Feeling the Worlds: New Poems

Maggie Helwig was a freelance writer and Professor of Pre-Industrial Arts, UPRPU, Peterborough, Ontario.

Feeling the Worlds is a collection of recent poems by Dorothy Livesay, issued in honour of the author’s seventy-fifth birthday. Livesay, with over a dozen books and two Governor General’s awards (1944 and 1947) to her credit, is certainly not an insignificant figure in Canadian literature. As is only to be expected, however, in a collection issued so shortly after her more important Phases of Love, Feeling the Worlds contains mainly occasional poetry and may be one of the less significant items in the body of Livesay’s work.

This is not to say that the poetry is not well crafted, for it is; and it is sometimes moving. But the poems are largely small-scale “studies,” addresses to friends and family, or brief reflections on the contemporary world — particularly the position of women within it. Women’s voices bulk large here, as in all of Livesay’s work; “Voices of Women” is in fact the title of one of the book’s four parts (the others are “Family Tree: A Suite,” “Found Poems,” and “Nature Studies”).

On the whole, Feeling the Worlds is probably best regarded as a minor work by a notable author.