The Way Home

Jill Kelly was a freelance writer living in Prince George, BC.

There is no doubt Elizabeth Brewster is a powerful poet. She doesn’t charge and stab with The Way Home, her first book of poems this year. She doesn’t knock down brusquely and make one take notice immediately. Her power is the “sneaking up” kind. She grips her subject from behind with the stealth of a hunting cat, and plays with the emotions she invites. This is a book that lingers.

Elizabeth Brewster sees and, again with the hunter’s acute awareness of every hidden signal, offers one the ironies in life.

Her style is straightforward and effective, drawing the reader into contemplation with gentle tones. She talks the daydreamer’s talk: unfinished lines drifting and floating in and out of the conversation of her being.

There’s a sharp-edged delicacy to her. She leaves me with an uneasy feeling. I like the wryness of her humour, but I get left behind wanting more from her. She doesn’t confront. She observes and evaluates but she doesn’t give the impression that she participates. She seems to make sense of her life by using the strings of the Past. She’s an historian flirting in the pages of what used to be who finds her definition through others.

Elizabeth Brewster allows herself to be changed by her environment, but appears to impress her own Self on that environment only timidly. She moves from a place, an experience, but leaves no footsteps for strangers to see where she has been. She advances and withdraws. She has accepted her concept of the inevitable and uses her sense of the absurd to convey how she feels.

I like The Way Home. I read it in bits, enjoying her jabs at human insecurities and vulnerabilities — she makes it comfortable to laugh (albeit wryly) at personal fears. Elizabeth Brewster is a divine emotional director and this poetic journey is worth every struggling minute: “In heaven I shall be a ballet dancer / creating perfect patterns / without words” (“New Year’s Day, 1978”).