On Glassy Wings

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

The ouevre of the late Governor General’s Award–winning poet Anne
Szumigalski is so diverse and so replete with complex images that to
review this collection of selected and new poems is a daunting
assignment. Her work offers both the audacity of the child and the
wisdom of the crone, sometimes in the same poem. “Theirs is the
song” features an imaginative child, “her feet scraping the tops of
the / forest trees as she floats by,” hoping to “understand
progression / how it has no end and no beginning.” The crone, who is
also present, notes that “[t]he reason for sky is Earth. / for the
Earth the sky.”

Szumigalski—who, like Blake, viewed the body as an emanation of
spirit that can be expressed through art—creates visions of eternity
through images of angels, rays of light, and candle flames. In the prose
poem “Green,” “God is at the hearth lighting a fire of green
boughs” and, in an unpretentious manner, offers the woman “the
greenness found in mint tea, absinthe, or in a viridian cup.”

These poems reflect an interest in maintaining the balance of the
universe: child and crone, intuition and intellect, earth and air are
necessary for achieving cosmic wholeness. In a thematic section titled
“Death and Other Abstractions,” we find angels “chanting their
creed / affirming their belief in light / and of course darkness.” In
Szumigalski’s cosmology, a woman is “what she seems to be: sand,
twigs, stones, and waves of disturbed air through which a bird has just
flown.”

The volume begins with a foreword by Don Kerr, who was an associate
editor with Szumigalski on Grain magazine. Kerr notes that in editing
this volume, Szumigalski wanted a thematic arrangement that would
“help people to read her in a new way.” On Glassy Wings does just
that.