Censored Letters

Cathy Matyas was a librarian in Toronto.

Censored Letters is a promising first book by a young Canadian poet. In this series of poems, Struthers speaks out against the physical and emotional toll that war extracts. Although the conflict that is named in the poems is World War I, Struthers’ work strikes a relevant note in the world of today. The speaker is a woman who is left behind with a young son when her husband goes to war, and each poem in this series is a moving testament to the loneliness, fear, alienation and hope that women feel during wartime. Often, the woman in Censored Letters is sustained only by her memories, and the most moving poems in this collection are those in which the woman addresses her absent husband across the miles that separate husband and wife. Although the majority of the poems in Censored Letters are meditations that arise in response to the woman’s waiting, other poems are fine descriptions of work that is done by women in a bullet factory and the paradox of that work: “There is not one thing heroic about this work. To set free /a man to fight. To make the bombs that kill him. To fuse /the week in days of ten hour shifts…” Censored Letters is a fine, at times eloquent, depiction of women and war. As Struthers writes in “At the Eleventh Hour”: “numb with waiting /now I almost dread to hear your voice, /your coming home to such a wife /nullified by wasted time /and all the dear, dumb dead.”