Selected Poems of Elizabeth Brewster, 1944-1977

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Perhaps influenced by the image of a deep-thinking, homespun woman, the image that Elizabeth Brewster projects at her readings, on reading her poetry I am in awe of her unique sensitivity to the human condition and her ability to transpose ordinary circumstances and situations into stirring, often mysterious and bewitching, sometimes humorous, poetry. The collection Selected Poems of Elizabeth Brewster, 1944-1977 provokes my admiration just as her nine earlier books of poetry and her novel Junction did. This book’s sequential arrangement into four sections, one for each of the four decades in which the poems were written, invites a study of the poet’s growth and development and of the change in her poetic expression.

The poems from the first two decades may be considered together, as they make up less than one quarter of the collection. Significantly, these early poems deal with universal topics. Place, despite Brewster’s attempt to subordinate it to human experience, rises as a prominent life force. One poem, “Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods” is an English war-bride’s interpretation of her Old World/New World psychological conflict. Longing to touch base with her distant past, she concludes, “And maybe—/I don’t know—when I got over there I’d miss the woods.” The tightly-crafted “Where I Come From” exhorts, “People are made of places.” It then describes those places — jungles, mountains, tropics, cities — which some people may carry, and the place which she herself carries, the woods where

and the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

Poems in the third section, like much Canadian poetry written in the turbulent ‘60s when poets as well as the Canadian population at large were obsessed with identity, dwell on identifying the Canadian character and that vague “place” Brewster mentioned in the earlier poems. These poems often have a first-person perspective. The titles of some of them (“The Night Grandma Died,” “Great-Aunt Rebecca,” and “William Brewster Disembarking from the Mayflower”) indicate Brewster’s recognition of her ancestors’ play in the country’s identity; the titles of others (“Atlantic Development,” “Summer Evening at Joggens,” “Sunrise North”), the role of place in establishing identity’s total context.

“Poems, 1970-1977,” which comprise over half of the collection, sweep beyond the boundaries of place and identity and explore topics ranging from tea-leaf reading and nervous breakdowns to undersea gardens and alchemy. My favorite — not just because it conjures in my mind childhood evenings filled with my Austrian father’s magical renditions of tall tales — is “Munchausen in Alberta”:

To conclude with that poem seems right. Having said that Brewster’s poems express compassion for humanity, having shown that they describe place and identity, I quote this poem in its entirety to exemplify, finally, Brewster’s versatility and wit.