Daisy Circus

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

Ottawa-Carleton Fiction Prize winner Rita Donovan’s second novel is a
sad/happy tale of an ever-so-Canadian family living at the “bottom of
the sea” in Montreal. The father is a farmer from the West, the mother
a lost runaway from Nova Scotia who has made up her own Rules of Being
for getting through life, and the two children, a girl and a boy, create
crying/laughing worlds of their own in a world already askew.

The family’s lives change forever when the precious, beloved son
Drake suffers a spine injury in a “touch” football game. The
daughter, whose birth name we never learn, joins the legion that
Robertson Davies calls the “twice born and twice named,” and dubs
herself Daisy Circus, refusing to answer to any other name. The book is
Daisy’s story, large sections of it in her voice, in letters to a
departed friend, conversations with a statue of Samuel de Champlain, and
ruminations about/discussions with her personal poet.

The poet is e.e. cummings, and his writings play an enormous part in
the development of Daisy’s inner life. The poet’s influence provides
the inspiration for her new name: “a boy in the yard with a horse
named Daisy Circus. A tall rocking horse, as big as a small pony, with a
real horse skin, leather saddle and stirrups. Daisy Circus in the sure,
early dew that sparkles on the skin; the boy can leave the horse on the
platform, and rock, or can take it off the tracks and bring it
outside”; “Daisy Circus is a foreverish thing.”

Daisy muddles and fails her way through her outside life as daughter,
lover, single woman living alone in Ottawa, and standup comic whose
partner leaves. Her inner life is nourished and completed by the poet,
and gives her strength to help her brother when no one else can. Reading
Daisy Circus is like peeling an onion—the outer layers provoke tears,
but the inner core is as sweet and delicious as fresh fruit. With poetry
and mathematical precision, Donovan leads her readers, breathless, to
the book’s last sentence. Daisy Circus “is a walk home on a winter
night, . . . a wonder, and a sharp-edged ecstasy.”