Portraits

M.E. Kappler was a Toronto freelance writer.

Lize Stilma is a Dutch woman who works with handicapped and otherwise dispossessed people. Many of the people in her care are mentally disturbed and several of the poems in this collection are based on her experiences with these peoplc. Stilma is a committed Christian whose consciousness is apparently steeped in scripture. Certainly her work contains many biblical echoes both in language and imagery.

The essence of Stilma’s faith seems to be a strong and incontrovertible sense of the innate dignity and worth of each human life — of the crazy, the malformed, the institutionalized. Stilma notices these people, remembers details, conversations, glances, clothes and incidents. Her records of these things reveal and celebrate, simply and undogmatically, the pure and unique humanity of her subjects. That she does so without sermons or sentimentality speaks highly of her as a person and a writer.

If examined in purely literary terms, Stilma’s poems are not particularly gripping. In fact they often read more like chopped prose than poetry. It is the integrity of her vision that makes these poems so powerful. Most of the poems are written in pure narrative form and are transparent in style, that is they do not impinge stylistically on the reader’s consciousness; the subject and meaning of each poem emerges with great impact. This is a strange and unusual effect; ineffective writing does not result in enhancing the reader’s understanding of the poet’s reality. Stilma’s success is attributable to the power of her vision and the strength and simplicity of her convictions.