I Didn't Get Used to It

Sparling Mills was a freelance reviewer living in Herring Cove, N.S.

I Didn’t Get Used to It is a slim volume: only 18 pages, 15 poems. What the author, Margaret Dyment, has never gotten used to is becoming older. She is now middle-aged and still in shock because of it. Her only comfort is that she has had her husband for company in this journey. Furthermore, it seems she is pleased with how her teenage children are turning out. So there is some compensation for those grey hairs.

The majority of Dyment’s poems deal with relationships. One of the more complicated of these is “November 11, 1982 — (Peace demonstrators outside Litton Industries in Toronto attempted to shut down the manufacture of instruments of war on Armistice Day).” Dyment is the mother of two of the demonstrators who were roughly dragged off to the police van. She thinks of the policeman’s mother and feels a bond with her. Presumably they were similar in caring tenderly for their children. She even realizes that the policeman may be a good father with “fragile growing children” of his own. As parents, they share a relationship.

Dyment is guided to another insight in the poem “A Memorial for One of My Teachers.” On a certain day the teacher had asked his class how many had “stopped to see a tree” in the past week. At that time, Dyment “couldn’t be numbered.” Ever since, however, she has remembered to stop now and then to appreciate “a tree in full glory.” In this way, the old teacher and she are experiencing a relationship.

Yet relationships do not always have to be with other people. In the excellent short poem “Cathy Reading,” the young girl interacts with the book she is reading. She “Steps to the words like a /Beach bird.” The poet continues the analogy with a variety of one-word lines interspaced with longer lines. The poem would have been even more subtle if Dyment had not used capital letters on the first words of all the lines. While she copes with aging, Dyment must be careful to keep up with modern poetic form.