The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

As anyone familiar with recent Canadian poetry knows, the name Pat
Lowther conjures up a death rather than a full life. It is this
disturbing fact that Christine Wiesenthal faces head on in this
carefully researched and written study of the life and work of a poet
who became truly famous only when her husband murdered her.
Wiesenthal’s argument is constructed through the ways she brings the
various threads of Lowther’s very full life into focus in a series of
empathetic and complexly intertwined chapters. She shows Lowther was a
writer and person of many faces who was just coming into her own as a
poet of importance when killed.

Because the manner of her death was so shocking, Wiesenthal wisely
deals with it first, in a section that both gathers all the information
on her death and the various responses to it, and challenges the
“normative” narrative attached to it. Using records of the murder
trial and Roy Lowther’s own journals, she is both detective and
cultural analyst as she investigates the cultural and sexual politics
surrounding the murder and the way it played out in the media and among
Lowther’s friends and associates. Having gotten that out of the way,
Wiesenthal can then turn to Lowther’s life and her background in a
fascinating series of chapters that justify the title of this critical
biography. Wiesenthal has been given access to Lowther’s papers as
well as many other documents associated with her various lives. Lowther
struggled all her life to achieve a kind of economic freedom, in order
to bring up her children and find time to pursue her art. Wiesenthal
brilliantly explores how this particular writer balanced (or did not)
her various commitments.

The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther is both a moving biography of a poet
killed before she had fully achieved the art of which she was capable,
and a critical argument about what biography as a genre can do. It is
well worth reading.