Shadow Cat: Poems & Wood Engravings

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Sylvia Hahn was born in Toronto in 1911. Daughter of Gustav Hahn, artist and teacher, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1932. She has been associated with the Royal Ontario Museum as an artist since 1934. Well-known for her wood engravings and murals, she began exhibiting with the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1934. She has illustrated two other books: The Four Heads Lyre, a book of Swedish poems by Lars von Hartnn, and A Naturalist’s Guide to Ontario. Now, she has written and illustrated her own book.

Shadow Cat was published “in two editions; one limited to 99 copies signed and numbered by the author/illustrator including a signed and numbered original engraving, printed in a similar edition, entitled Tabby Cat;two a trade edition of 1000 copies.” Shadow Cat is a delightful slim volume of six poems printed on beautiful acid-free paper. The poems and engravings are all about her pet tabby cat; each poem has its own accompanying woodcut. “I have a kitten, tabby-grey, /It gets in mischief all the day. /It claws my sweaters and my pants /It digs among the potted plants…” The cat is depicted in all its normal activities; digging, jumping, hunting, watching, waiting, and washing. Ms. Hahn captures perfectly the mood of feline activity. In one woodcut the cat is glaring at us amidst the bushes under a moonlit sky; in another, the face of the cat is portrayed in various moods; in still another, the striped cat is crouching among the twigs and leaves; in another, he is washing, assuming all the impossible contortions that cats assume when carrying out this activity. In “Shadows in the Night” she writes: “Soundless he seeks, Shadow among the shadows, /Moving on pads black-velvet, steeped in darkness. /His coat, moon-blotched and foliage-stippled, /Melts in the fallen leaves and fallow grasses, /Unheard, unseen, unheralded, until he pounces.”

It is a charming book for one who does not demand poetic sophistication.