Collected Poems

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

Miriam Waddington has been publishing poetry since the 1930s. This thick collection gathers nearly five hundred poems from throughout that long career and provides an afterword in which the poet puts them in historical and personal perspective.

Miriam Waddington has always been a social poet in the sense that the everyday world can be felt inher poems or on their edges. History matters; changes in a life matter; landscapes are populated; people push their way into the verse. There is the absconding husband who breaks down before the social-worker and reveals that the child is not his. And the “clerk/from Trois Rivieres/Who trills his r’s/And slicks his hair.” Who is he? These and many others have lives and stories beyond the poems.

We understand readily that the interest Waddington stimulates in the world proceeds from her own interest. She worked for years as a social worker, before becoming a professor of English: the conscious efforts to bring her daily experience into poetry are admirable and may some day become documents of the period.

Waddington’s personal lyric poetry is also saturated with a sense of people and of place, often presented with much acuteness and intelligence of perception: the poem, for instance, which brings the Sudbury landscape and the prose of Flaubert together, is wonderfully alive with ironic meaning.

Generally the voice of the poet is gentle: wonder, wry comment and muted suffering are frequent tones and we learn from her own remarks that she casts herself as an observer, a “brooding outsider.” In this light one sees the prosodic shift (which the author dates as from the 1960’s) towards the shorter line as almost beneficent change, for in the tightening of the units, the expression of ideas appears to become pointed, the impressions of scenes sharp, and generally the natural talent for observation well served. The afterword contains other useful comments which bear generally on the recent history of poetry in Canada as well as on Waddington’s own poetic development. This is a very solid collection.