The Life and Times of Transition Girl

Sarah Mead-Willis is a public services librarian in the Humanities and
Social Sciences Library at the University of Alberta.

Sonia Halpern introduces her debut collection with a versified
disclaimer: “my poems are purely fiction / with more than a grain of
truth.” While this statement belies the confessional nature of many of
the poems that follow, it also hints at the universality of their
themes. Grouped into two parts (the introspective “Life” and the
circumstantial “Times”), Halpern’s compact verses deliver ironic,
often waspish remarks on the frustrations of courtship, the vagaries of
men, and other preoccupations of the modern, educated, independent
woman. The tone is conversational and the language transparent, formal
experimentation ceding to traditional rhyme schemes and metrical
scansion; this is intended to be accessible poetry on accessible subject
matter.

In his foreword to the collection, John Gerry likens Halpern to a
latter-day Dorothy Parker, presumably because Halpern appreciates how
verse can be honed into an instrument of incisive irony and penetrating
observation. Appreciation, alas, does not equal aptitude. For all its
accessibility, The Life and Times of Transition Girl is disappointingly
awkward: a catalogue of forced rhymes (“so you start to serve and
cater / until you learn to hate her”), flatfooted titular puns (“My
Ex-it”; “The Wedding Alter”), and envoys cribbed from a
second-rate standup act (“I saw my therapist for my issues of loss /
And a few hours later he died”).

Worse than the clumsiness of the poems, however, is the character
lurking behind them. Whether she is Halpern or Everywoman is beside the
point; her remarks (particularly concerning romance and romantic
rejection) offer neither the offbeat inversions of popular wisdom nor
the desperate, damaged laughter that made Dorothy Parker’s work so
memorable. Instead, we are treated to the insecure and vaguely
narcissistic repartee of a woman who professes maturity, but whose
writing resembles the diary of a petulant teenager. Indeed, the only
tolerable (though by no means good) pieces in the collection are those
that sidestep the poet’s ego and focus on other subjects, such as
family and religion.

If her work is to be taken seriously, perhaps Halpern ought to heed the
puckish injunction of Robert Kroetsch: “Poet, no thyself.”