Anything Is Possible: A Selection of Eleven Women Poets

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

Anything Is Possible, 185 pages of poetry by Canadian women, is the most powerful, collective, feminist poetic statement to appear yet on the Canadian literary scene. Featured in this collec-tion are established and not-so-young and young and new journey/women poets: Roo Borson, Marilyn Bowering, Jan Conn, Lorna Crozier, Mary di Michele, Susan Glickman, Erin Mouré, Libby Scheier, Carolyn Smart, Rosemary Sullivan, and Bronwen Wallace. Their poems about female initiation; responsibilities of women; women s relationships with friends, families and lovers; and women’s place in the cosmos create a vast, synchronic portrait of the contemporary woman’s life. The accumulative content of this book is invigorating. The styles of the poems, however, are disappointingly bland and uniform.

While it is impossible to describe individual styles adequately, the poems as a whole are written in standard free verse and in, surprisingly, correct sentences; they are un-innovative. Apart from a smattering of prose poems, the collection lacks the bold experimental touch of post-modern word tricksters or, even, concrete poets. Here, there are no strained syntactical structures, restless repetitions, or radical Dalyean word splits. This absence does not diminish the book’s feminist quality; rather, it defines it as conservative feminist: conservative in style, feminist in content.

Although the poems focus on many topics, perhaps the most subtly feminist are those concerned with initiation and women’s place in the cosmos. Both Borson’s “Sixteen” and Conn’s “Fifteen” explore the teenage girl’s mysterious and wanton yearnings for experience. On the other hand, Crozier’s “The Last Day of Fall”, di Michele’s Natural Beauty, and Sullivan’s “Hunting for Tropical Plants in the Golfetta” celebrate nature; Romantic conventions are contorted by implicitive paralleling nature’s darkness to women’s relationships.

Darkness similarly pervades the poems about family relationships. Reality is not glamorous. Glickman’s “The Sadness of Mothers” becomes the selflessness of mothers, while Wallace’s “My Son Is Learning to Invent” describes the unbreakable and undeniable mother/child bond that perpetuates women’s selflessness. Other poems, Scheier’s “Dwarfs and War,” Crozier’s “Monologue: Prisoner Without a Name,” and Mouré’s “State of Rescue” define the harsh realities of rape and battery. Women’s sacrifices for the cause of marriage are epitomized in Wallace’s mild-toned “The Woman in This Poem,” a poem about an ordinary suburban woman’s denial of real experience for the sake of her family.

Although many poems are concerned with women’s family relationships, some deal with women’s relationships with friends, lovers, and ancestors. Smart’s “Flying” characterizes the power of sisterhood; Bowering’s “This Is the Last Time,” the sadness of parting, and Crozier’s “This Is a Love Poem without Restraint,” that rare richness of some love affairs. Using a frightening image, a wind chime made from ancestral bones, Crozier links the prairie wind to generations of ancestors in “Ancestry.”

It is impossible to do justice to the complexity of this book’s content; it is best summarized by the closing lines of the book, which are, as well, the closing lines of Wallace’s “A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf”:

. . . as I write these words

those ordinary details intervene

between the poem I meant to write

and this one where the delicate faces

of my children faces of friends

of women I have never even seen

glow on the blank pages

and deeper than any silence

press around me

waiting their turn.