Private Properties

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Leona Gom began to publish verse nationally some fifteen years ago. She wrote then about her growing-up in the Peace River country, about the cold, the isolation, the crude domestication of the frontier land (including the ubiquitous outhouse), and the experience of exchanging that world for the city, where she saw escalators and tiled toilets for the first time. Now, six books later, she is a big-city woman, living and working in Vancouver. In a way, though, she is still writing about outhouses; that is to say, her subject matter is ordinary human objects and living.

If the lives are ordinary, and sometimes awkward and contradictory, the tone is not superior and the idiom of these poems is always close to the vernacular. This volume is divided into three parts, subheaded: “keeping in shape,” “a better revolutionary,” and “warm vinegar” — the first is personal; the second, feminist; the third, general, but Gom’s poems are always personal and made accessible through the personality she creates, plain, sensible, humourous and alert. This is an accomplished, confident book.