The Wire-Thin Bride

Darleen R. Golke is a teacher and librarian at Fort Richmond Collegiate
in Winnipeg.

Marcia Perkins’s aqua-and-white cover illustration of this,
Hoogland’s first poetry collection, focuses attention on the image of
“a wedding dress swing[ing] from a branch,” from the introductory
poem, “Garage Sale.” Recurring images of white and the sky’s blue
appear through Hoogland’s five sequences of poems.

The poems provide intensely personal glimpses into a woman’s daily
life, touching on family, love, relationships, and death. Much of the
imagery comes from nature: “rocks that split the sun,” “sunfoiled
sky,” “a moon-faced arm,” “the Three Stars splitting the sky,”
“frost’s archangel.”

Hoogland’s deft handling of lyrical language and images drawn from
nature is especially poignant in the sequence “How Our Feet Go On,”
chronicling her Dutch-Canadian immigration experience in “this
insatiable country”—“how promising it looked on posters.” The
poetic language flows most smoothly when Hoogland speaks of past and
present relationships, as in “A Song That’s Over Too Soon” and
“The Bridge You Forgot”; and least smoothly when she reacts to art
or the machinery of daily life, as in “In the Gallery” and
“Letting Betsy Go.”

As the wedding dress of the cover blows gently in the wind, so the
images of white and blue flow gently through Hoogland’s poetry,
unifying and clarifying her poetic voice.