Mind Your Eyes

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and the
Public, and the editor of “Improved by Cultiv

“We were a country, not a colony, when Armine Gosling shouted, ‘we
strive for freedom for ourselves and for all Newfoundland women’; then
May Kennedy jumped from her seat and called: ‘to the Country of
Newfoundland.’” Take that very prosaic bit of prose, arrange it into
six phrases (however you please), remove some of the punctuation, and
you get what Marian Frances White obviously considers to be poetry. Most
of the more than 50 “poems” in this collection—save a few like
“St. Mary’s Bay” and “Queen Mother”—are, seemingly,
rearranged bits of prose, lacking the pithiness, the rhythm, the
effervescence of good poetry. This is not to say that White’s
“prose/poems” are unappealing: far from it. In pieces like
“Lifetime Guarantee in Curly’s Cove,” “She Got the Berry Hill
Woes,” and many others, there are wit and humour and pathos enough to
keep one reading through the entire text. They are, for the most part,
entirely enjoyable and imaginatively engaging. But are they, or do they
even need to be called, “poems”?