Aqua

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Marriott has had a long and distinguished career, though her poetry has
not received the currency that it deserves. Her long poem The Wind Our
Enemy (1939) gives her a place in Prairie poetry comparable to Sinclair
Ross’s place in fiction of the region. This collection continues her
work with narrative and lyric. The book has a tone of farewell, with two
sections dealing with death. The best work comes in the title sequence,
“Aqua,” with its celebration of water as a spiritual force and as a
symbol of the peace of death. Earth’s “soured streams” will
sweeten in the ocean, she tells us. The poems in the “Death in the
Cariboo” section are excellent as well, offering some strong regional
imagery to convey universal themes.

Less effective is the long narrative about the Isle of Rhodes, “Roses
and Daggers.” Story and lyric don’t work together well enough, and
the characters are stereotypes. The last section, “Regarding Death,”
has some fine poems about illness and the imminence of death. They
achieve honesty without morbidity, especially in the elegiac “The
Lake,” a poem that tallies those who have gone before and takes a
clear-eyed look at the prospect of joining others in the weedy lake of
death. This is a mature book in every sense and a crown to Marriott’s
career.