Townswomen and Other Poems

Marjorie Body taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary.

Of the 30 poems in this collection, 19 (subtitled “Poems”) deal with a diversity of subjects ranging from “Semitic Sunlight” to “Becoming a Consumer.” These poems are sketches reflecting an awakening artistic consciousness. The remaining 11 poems (“Townswomen”) capture the essence, as it were, of characters from the works of other writers; for example, from Canadians Laurence, Callaghan, Buckler, and from Americans Anderson and Faulkner.

Conway receives high praise from George Woodcock and Alden Nowlan. Woodcock says the poems “combine a great visual intensity with considerable wit.” And Nowlan, about whom Conway has written a literary profile, states, “a justifiably confident new talent strides onto the stage ...” and further that the work “concerns itself above all with the joy, the pathos and the comedy of human inter-relationships.”

Conway, a law student, shows promise in her poetic creations, but her work, when compared with that of her contemporaries Roo Borson and Erin Mouré, is still in its graduate student phase.