Getting Wise

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

Yeo’s collection is centred on her life as part of the lesbian
feminist movement. The reader finds out early that she has a definite
audience in mind. The dedication reads: “to all women who write,”
and especially “all women.”

As male readers of this work we are introduced to writing that we would
not usually encounter. We are outsiders, looking into the lives of a
community of lesbians. The book’s theme is for women to obtain wisdom
and to work to destroy all of the “isms” that plague our society.

In “i’ve got wounds” she says “not one of us will ever be free
of wounds / of scars / of this contorting bitter taste in the mouth.”
Women are portrayed as victims, as the oppressed; they are not safe
outside the confines of their own circles. Within these circles,
however, Yeo addresses the friendship and love between women. Here we
encounter universal themes like the failure to communicate with friends,
or the lust for one another. On the most passionate level she speaks of
women coming together to create and join their words into action—their
personal into their public lives. They are victims because they are
visible. They know the “truth” and each woman must “choose if she
will fight / how she will fight / and which weapon she will use.” In
“the hard truth” Yeo confronts the conflict she feels between her
own contribution to the cause and her individual purpose. She
acknowledges that she tires of hearing her own voice, and recognizes
that speech does not always lead to action. The collection is all in
contemporary free verse, without punctuation or capitalization, and runs
the gamut of emotions. It is an intense work that reads almost like a
diary.

Getting Wise, despite its clearly defined audience, puts itself on
display. Women will in all likelihood hear Yeo as a strong voice for
action and insight. For men, her writing offers a needed glimpse into a
world too often shrouded in (male-generated?) myth, and a chance to
share feelings that, taken into perspective, are familiar to us all.
There is no guesswork involved with this book. Yeo is exposed for all
those who are willing to look.