In This House Are Many Women

Marilyn Orr teaches English at Laurentian University.

“The Love Song of Lucy Lament” (the title of a late poem in this
volume) and a couple of explicit allusions confirm one’s early sense
of a surprising affinity between the poetic perspective of Sheree Fitch
and that modernist city-prophet T.S. Eliot. There are in both a
masterful sense of sound (both in the technical sense of rhythm and
rhyme, and in the sense of attunement to the voices of the modern city),
an instinct to uncover the sacred “in the midst of the city scum,”
and a dramatic power that charges even solitary characters.

But these vibrant poems are spoken in a thoroughly female,
contemporary, and Canadian voice, one that relates the joys and horrors
of a familiar and dangerous world. The first section, from which the
book takes its name, offers up stories of a woman’s shelter as
“lullabies for all the others / living in a house / where there is no
shelter.” In this house the grim and sad (“appearance / is important
/ especially / when you have disappeared”) nudge against the crass and
comic (“well sir my qualifications are / fuck all / squeals of
laughter”). Most powerful is the graphic “Filling Out the Form,” a
cagelike grid in which a childish, uneven scrawl poses unanswerable
questions.

As companion to the sage’s ear of understanding, Fitch brings to her
perception the child’s sense of wonder. “If you’re very lucky /
you’ll get seven minutes of ecstasy,” we are advised, but meanwhile,
check out that madonna (a child-care worker with “a halo / around her
head”) and the garbage man Barishnikov. Along with the winsomely
philosophical Lucy, perhaps the most memorable character we meet in
these poems is Diana, who gradually transforms her suburban home into a
circus until her fatal fall from “the clothesline tightrope.” In
Fitch’s world “[f]inding your balance / is a lifetime / high wire /
journey,” and, far from falling, “Diana free-forms.”