Radiant Life Forms

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Brebner’s poetry has appeared in some of Canada’s most prestigious
small magazines, as well as in an anthology of Dutch-Canadian
literature. This book’s themes include love, death, and what she terms
“radiance.”

Brebner acknowledges Margaret Atwood, whom she uses as a model for
“Meditations on the Serene Blue Shirt.” Each writer uses the
Canadian landscape to advantage, and finds torturous paradoxes in
personal relationships, but Brebner’s images often lack the cutting
edge of Atwood’s.

Brebner’s imagery is too abstract and ambiguous, especially in the
central image of “radiance.” Graphically effective in a striking
cover image of a blackened torso deep in blue-green water, the concept
becomes repetitious. Is “radiance” a transcendental consummation
devotedly to be wished? In the title poem, Brebner does not want to
share the “radiant catastrophe.” Yet in “Watching a Child Find Her
Death,” she welcomes such transfiguration: “Her light / will invade
my bones, and I will find the / quiet, luminous place where she recedes,
to / radiant life.” Perhaps the phosphorescent “Radiant Lady” is
death itself.

Brebner is more effective when she embraces realism (as in “The
Sparrow Drawer”) or echoes Wallace Stevens’s purity, as in
“Morning Poem”: “This is a morning of / white parakeets / and red
tea in white porcelain.” Here and in the sensitive “Kimono Poems,”
she uses primary colors to technical advantage.

Finally, Brebner might do well to examine her prosody. Why arbitrarily
double-space every two lines?

Brebner has several perspectives. It will be interesting to watch her
develop.