Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life

Thomas M.F. Gerry is an English professor at Laurentian University.

This book is the second in a planned 40-volume Canadian Biography
Series. While such an undertaking seems massive, the way ECW has chosen
to go about it makes the project easily workable and no doubt
commercially attractive. High-school libraries appear to be the most
likely purchasers. To call Stevens’s contribution—and, I presume,
the others in the series, given that they are slated to be formatted
identically—a biography, however, is like calling Maclean’s a social
history: it’s not altogether a false claim, but the label’s promises
are not adequately fulfilled.

The “biography” is arranged into brief sections (entitled, for
instance, “Parents,” “Father,” “Mother,” “First Books,”)
and traces the outline of Livesay’s life chronologically. Stevens
takes pains, though, to superimpose patterns on his “first this, then
this, then this” arrangement of episodes in Livesay’s life. The book
opens with a report on the weather on Livesay’s birthday, October 12,
1909: snow. Stevens hypothesizes that this meteorological event’s
coinciding with Livesay’s nativity “set in motion certain cycles,”
including (the only example given) her publishing a volume of poetry
entitled Ice Age. Unfortunately, this type of entertaining speculation
(the flyer for the series claims that the biographies “above all . . .
entertain and inform”) vanishes, and the reader is left to contemplate
such informative patterns as Stevens’s configuring Livesay’s
“father as mentor on the prose and fiction side, and mother on the
side of poetry and song.”

Stevens’s sources for this slender offering include Livesay’s
published works and her unpublished papers, a few articles and relevant
books, and Lee Briscoe Thompson’s Twayne’s World Authors Series
study of Livesay, a book of much more use to the student of this poet.
Clearly not usefulness but filling a market niche, no matter how
perfunctorily, is the motivation for publishing such a “biography.”
This niche, the student and general reader (according to ECW’s flyer),
deserves better. So does Dorothy Livesay.