In Cannon Cave

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Although these are poems that could have arisen only out of women’s
experience, a refreshing and welcome feature of this book is that the
poetry is intrinsically feminine without being ideologically feminist. A
male reader does not feel excluded—and that is a point worth
emphasizing these days.

One poem, to be sure, is dedicated to Anne Sexton, and another (the
most conventional and least successful) borrows from an article about
Sylvia Plath; yet, though these poems might be categorized as
confessional, they are not embarrassingly revelatory. Between the lines
we may read an all-too-familiar distressing tale about unhappy love, a
broken liaison, and even hints of temporary breakdown, but the lines
themselves are poignant, endearing, positive. The opening poem is
entitled “Prayer,” and although there is nothing dogmatically
religious about the poems, there is a spiritual dimension to most of
them. While in no way oppressively rustic or escapist, they are full of
the natural imagery of wind and weather and tide. Words like
“praise,” “luminous,” “kindness” occur regularly, and ensure
balance.

It is also a pleasure to record that, although many of the poems are
intimate love poems chronicling “the rituals of love,” they are
unabashedly sexual without being either “sexy” in the vulgar sense
or drearily clinical. They are poems, so rare these days, that preserve
the privacy of love. They are also engagingly simple, direct, and
accessible in word and thought. For instance: “Whatever we do and
don’t do, / we live, finally, by shining”; “Old age walks towards
me. I want nothing / to do with it, like a teenager ashamed of her
mother.”

All in all, this a handsome, elegant volume.