Insights and Outlooks

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

This is Stitt’s fifth book of poetry, a sizable one at 142 pages; she
is a prolific versifier. It is difficult to categorize her work because
it embraces so many styles.

At first sight, Ogden Nash’s epigrams come to mind, some deft, some
lumbering. “Taxidermy (stuff this)” is clever and smooth: “Most
things I handle coolly / but some things make me burn, / like the tax
I’m taxed on stamps I buy / to mail my tax return.” Others, like
“Insight,” read like devotional doggerel and, like the punning
“Croaked” (“I had a little froggie and he got squashed flat”),
might do well with children.

Often Stitt’s rhyme has serious problems. In “Summit as pique
experience,” which matches “To this city where I dwell” with
“and folk who do not love me well,” she inverts word order and
sounds artificial.

For her themes, she focuses on social satire, love, and nature. But
even in her satire she seems to borrow, as from Smith’s “The
Canadian Authors Meet” in “Ad nauseum”: “a study to study the
study.” Some of her more powerful work is written in free verse (for
example, “Out of Play,” which echoes Stephen Crane, and “As my
father lay dying,” a sensitive tribute).

If Stitt decided which voice she preferred, she could write credible
devotional poetry, snappy epigrams, humorous children’s poetry, or
solid free verse; mashed into the same volume, however, the collection
demands too much aesthetic adjustment from the reader.