Gold Earrings

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

It is always sad to read a book by someone who has committed suicide. Such a book is Gold Earrings, by Sharon Stevenson. The editor, Rhea Tregebov, has chosen to set out seven sections of selected poems, in chronological order. They begin with an exquisite lyric and deteriorate into rantings. The problem was that Stevenson espoused communism to such an extent that she felt she had to preach world revolution. This conviction engulfed her more and more, until she was no longer writing what could be called poetry. To write good poetry, one must have a certain amount of detachment.

The most powerful image in the book is that of “the great birch” (p.26). It endures extreme hardship, and even when it is on fire, it sends out sprouts which guarantee that it will live in the future. Unlike the birch, however, Stevenson was unable to endure; there was always a “split” — a frequent word in her work — between what seemed to her the escapism of writing lyrical poems and the necessity to attack the Canadian bourgeoisie. She uses the word “red” like a code word, and progressively loses her sensuous flower imagery. In one of her last poems, “Weeding,” she warns herself that if she smothers her heart, “there sits self-murder at the end/grinning” (p. 110). In this she was prophetic.

Her death was a loss to the feminist movement. Yet even attention to the role of women would have had to wait until after the revolution. Robin Endres discusses Stevenson’s paradoxes in an excellent introduction.