A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

Lorna Crozier’s handsomely designed tenth book of poems is a powerful
tribute to Sinclair Ross’s 1941 novel, As For Me and My House. That
novel, told in journal form by Mrs. Bentley, the wife of a minister
living in a Saskatchewan village during the Depression, chronicles the
couple’s troubled marriage and Rev. Bentley’s loss of vocation.
These narrative poems trace Mrs. Bentley’s gradual acknowledgment of
her loss of innocence.

As in the novel, both Rev. and Mrs. are artists—he a painter, she a
pianist. “Playing Liszt” captures a near-perfect moment between
musician and audience: “That night my fingers sparked on ivory. / For
a moment what was good / in the boy and me, / what was graceful, without
guile, / found a home together.” What is graceful in the speaker’s
life becomes the “saving grace” of the title.

Much of the book’s appeal lies in Mrs. Bentley’s keenly observant,
honest, and wise voice. She reveals her frustrated passions against the
richly evoked background of a doomed prairie landscape; whether or not
the voice achieves redemption or rebirth, like the landscape, remains
unclear.

What is made clear in the final poem is that the Reverend “is not the
hero of / this story.” Crozier’s decision to leave it to the reader
to determine the identity of the hero is unsatisfying. The wide
emotional range of the preceding poems calls for a fuller resolution.