Wheel of Change

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.

Wheel of Change was published, we are told in a publisher’s note,
“in honour of the author’s seventieth birthday.” Elizabeth
Brewster has now been an inconspicuous but nonetheless persistent
presence in Canadian poetry for 40 years. Hers is not a name that may
immediately come to mind when our poets are mentioned (she is absent
from several of the influential anthologies), but for many her integrity
and undemonstrative authority as a writer of verse are both impressive
and memorable.

Despite the drastic changes in the world and within Canada between the
1950s and 1990s, her verse has remained fairly stable. Here her admirers
will find much that they have come to expect. A troubled tone sometimes
emerges, as in the opening sequence (which gives its name to the book),
where a reading of Marcus Aurelius and a stoic response to a threatened
Canada are beautifully developed and intermingled through 13 poems.
Later, there is some interesting experimentation with traditional forms,
though I think Brewster is most effective in her own inimitable version
of “free verse,” which sounds so casual and unstudied yet is the
result of patient discipline.

Brewster has always had the gift of creating genuine poems out of the
everyday circumstances of an ordinary life. In a century when poetry is
too often considered “difficult,” her work speaks to everyone
without losing either dignity or profundity. A sequence entitled
“Poems for Seven Decades” offers an admirable impressionistic memoir
of the fashions and attitudes of a lifetime. She is prepared to risk the
prosaic, the sentimental, the facile, and a few poems succumb. But most
do not, and the individual voice that emerges deserves to be heard and
absorbed.

In one poem she remembers “old band concerts in the park” and, with
a sly pun on human and poetic feet, implicitly sums up her art as
“feet marching in time / to simplicities of courage.” I can think of
no better description.