Garden of Sculpture

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Elizabeth Brewster has been publishing poetry for almost 50 years and
has earned a reputation for extremely human, unostentatious, and
accomplished verse. In 1995 she published a selection of her later work
entitled Footnotes to the Book of Job; its title poem indicated a new
development in her subject matter, a reconsideration of biblical stories
not in any doctrinal sense but as an extension of her meditations on the
complexities of human living.

This preoccupation is extended in the opening and closing sections of
the present collection in the titled “Angelic Influence” and
“Garden of Sculpture,” respectively. The latter is concerned with a
visit to the Holy Land. I found some of the Bible-derived poems
disappointing. In “Dinah and Her Brethern,” “Tamar’s Story,”
and “Ruth and Baoz,” Brewster does little more than retell biblical
tales. But the poems about her personal responses to sacred places and
sacred stories are as subtle and individualized as ever.

A further development is now discernible in her work. Early in the
volume, a poem called “Naming: A Gloss” takes four lines from P.K.
Page’s “Cook’s Mountains” and elaborates them into a four-verse
poem in which each of Page’s lines becomes the final line in each of
Brewster’s stanzas. This form, technically known as a glosa (or
gloss), was developed in medieval Spain, and Page herself introduced it
into Canadian verse in her collection titled Hologram (1994). Other
glosas, using lines from A.M. Klein, Lewis Carroll, and George Herbert,
and a variation involving Robert Herrick, occur later in the book.

Brewster is not quite as rigorous as Page, and her verse is less
notable for rich formal artifice; nevertheless, the development is
welcome. It demonstrates that, serious poet that she is, she is always
prepared to experiment, albeit within the historical traditions of her
art. Garden of Sculpture is as gratifyingly skilful as all her books,
and will give pleasure to her many admirers.