Writing Lovers: Reading Canadian Love Poetry by Women

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Writing Lovers is an academic analysis of the poetry of primarily eight
Canadian women, some better known than others.

Cook’s central premise exhorts that the lover has been made a
creature of solitude who yearns for an appropriate means of expression.
Judeo-Christian theology, which has, historically, influenced the
thinking in this country, encourages followers to suppress or repress
sexual love, and psychoanalysis, another major power in Western
thinking, “commits him to renounce the beloved as lost.” For women
who have traditionally held a more passive social role to begin with,
falling in love can be an isolating experience, one for which there are
no words. Cook believes that female poets seek to give love a voice, and
do so in different ways.

Dorothy Livesay, for example, resolves this dilemma in her poem “This
Page My Book” by creating a metaphor that equates lovers’ bodies
with a physical page of poetry. She writes of the struggle to stay in
the margins, of margins being invaded, and of making her trembling mark.
At the end of the poem, Cook states that Livesay decides to “live
neither by the oppression of the ‘inside’ nor through the idealized
(and illusory) freedom of the ‘outside’ but on the threshold of
both.” Louise Bernice Halfe, a poet who writes of her experience as an
Aboriginal Canadian, expresses the loss of voice through “metaphors of
consumption.” In Cook’s words, “The woman who has been traded from
father to husband receives the latter’s caress in the knowledge that
her body has merely replaced the body of the animal he has been
butchering.” In other words, the woman is something to be passed from
one man to another, a passive vessel in a larger social structure.

Writing Lovers will be of interest to scholars of Canadian poetry.