Covering Rough Ground

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

Covering Rough Ground covers ground both familiar and new: poems
concerning working life, birth and family, and biography. Braid is a
carpenter whose working life is reflected in the poems of the first two
sections of the book, “The Birth of Buildings” and “Sister in the
Brotherhood.” To the poems about work, she brings a female eye:
“Pouring concrete is just like baking a cake,” she asserts in
“Recipe for a Sidewalk,” but she is always aware of the sensitivity
and difficulty of being female in a largely male-dominated profession.
In discussing the relationships of men and women on the building site
and in the union hall, she suggests grounds for a true communion of
like-minded individuals working together for a common goal and searching
for a language unaffected by gender stereotyping and misapprehension.

In her birthing and motherhood poems, Braid is the outsider coming in,
assisting at the births of others’ babies (“Sisters to Mothers”)
and acting as stepmother to a teenage boy. She finds, as the title of
the third section declares, “Where She Wants To Be” by acknowledging
her foremothers as well as those women she works beside. These are
strong poems of affirmation: “Remember when we talked about / what
they say, that / women can’t fly this plane / (crude jokes about
Beavers) / and I told you the secret, that / it doesn’t take a man /
to push a button marked / Power!” (from “Woman Bush Pilot: 1”).

In the final section, “Woman Who Knows Wood,” Braid addresses Emily
Carr, another woman who ventured into an established male domain, only
with paintings strongly sensual and female. I wish I had room to quote
these poems in full, for that is the only way to appreciate their power,
the interplay between details from the paintings and what they say about
women working in the world.

Braid’s concern with women’s rights, combined with the lyricism of
her poems, was recognized by the League of Canadian Poets, which chose
this, her first book, as winner of the Pat Lowther Award. It is a fine
work of poetry, well worthy of the prize.