Mother, I'm So Glad You Taught Me How to Dance

Mary Jane Starr was with the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Vancy Kasper’s earlier publication, Always ask for a transfer, is a novel concerned with the experience of a 14-year-old boy and his sister living in foster homes. This is her first published collection of poetry. Some of the poems, however, have appeared in magazines and anthologies previously. The 46 poems are divided into 4 untitled, symmetrically apportioned sections.

Three themes dominate the collection: music, love, and dance. Musical allusions play throughout and Kasper’s tastes are wide ranging — from jazz to opera, from classical to blues. If music is the background, then love is centre stage. Love is enjoyed and savoured, lost and mourned. Kasper’s love poems encompass themes from the bittersweet refrain of “you said you’d come” in “Summersong” to the sardonic final couplet “Some women are like that. / Can’t get enough of what they don’t need” in “Some men are like that.” In “Disconnected,” the focus is on the physical aspects of love. The palpable longing for sexual love may lack subtlety but it is wonderfully evocative because of the realistic and frank expression of the poet. The third theme, dance, is the marriage of music and love — the synergistic manifestation of those powerful forces. Dance is the expression of the indominable spirit of the poet.

Vancy Kasper writes honestly about the reality of diminishing physical powers, the aging process, and finally death and loss. Yet she writes always in the affirmative voice. Even the title poem, with its hints of mortality (“after the hospital parts of her wouldn’t heal”) maintains the pervasive life-affirming quality (“It didn’t matter about no one being able to repair her”). Kasper offers enduring hope in her poetry, for where there is music and love and dance, there is life.