Digging In

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This has been a prolific year for Elizabeth Brewster. Earlier this year she published The Way Home (Oberon Press), and now we have Digging In.

The book offers no surprises. In her usual conversational way, she makes poetry out of everyday affairs — a rural or city landscape; a remembered conversation; the inner world of dreams, memories, and desires. The book is divided into three parts. The very first poem in the first part, “You Say,” is meant to accompany a volume of Japanese art and is a set of nine delicate little verses in shades of grey, brown, and pink, based loosely on the Japanese haiku mode. Other poems deal with dreams and memories of the past. “At the same age I ran away / out of our backyard, across the road / to the home of an old neighbour woman / with a face like a nutcracker / who wore a flannel cap in the daytime. / She fed me sugar cookies / and played on the cranked-up gramophone / a record of fiddle music / to which I danced on the kitchen floor / while her old bachelor brother / step-danced and snapped his fingers / on the other side of the room.” The second part, “Renewable Glory,” deals with the renewing and consoling powers of nature and the importance of the present moment. “I have come in from walking by the river / marvelling how it renews itself / ... It will all go on. / I need not even be alive, / ... for it all to go on as usual.” In the third section, “Tibetan Jewel Box,” some of the poems reflect on the passage of time and the final fate of the human race. In “Neutron Bomb,” the poet imagines a quiet world bereft of humanity.

In some of the poems we feel that sharp jagged edge of pain, that inherent loneliness that Elizabeth Brewster has revealed to us in previous works.

“Yes, admittedly, / I have crazy moments / certainly morbid ... Why am I always nervous / walking across the bridge in the morning / except that I know how easy / it would be for me / to throw myself over the side? / how narrow the walk is / along the edge of sanity ...” In her previous works, this mood was more pronounced. Here, in Digging In, she demonstrates a greater sense of peace, a coming to terms with herself and with the world. “After all / do I not bitch too much / about life, which has offered me in its time / strawberries in woods, / marigolds in the back garden / with the spicy smell / of their broken stems, / and even some love.”