Virgin Territory

Chris Knight is the managing editor of the Canadian HR Reporter.

Many of the 44 poems in this collection take as their titles the
language and imagery of religion—“A Last Supper;”
“Crown-of-Thorns;” “A Kind of Catechism”—but the titles are
mere jumping-off points for an imagery that is more secular, personal,
and physical than that drawn from the rarefied world of religion. Betsy
Struthers’s poems are not irreverent, but they recognize an earthiness
as real as the spiritual world. In “Acts of Worship,” she writes,
“Hail rocks / the car as later you and I will rock, kneeling in the
haven / of our tumbled bed, salt on the tongue, sacred salt, / salt of
her primal sea.” Many kinds of love are embodied in these poems. In
the opening piece, Struthers writes, “Here is a family in which the
word love / is not said aloud, in which sisters / shake hands when they
meet.” The elderly and dying as well as growing children all receive
secular benedictions.

There is more to these poems than manifestations of emotions. In easy,
loping sentences, the poet captures the rhythms of nature, “choir of
wrens in a trellis of vines” or “wooded granite hills that press in
/ on the lake, a tear of blue in the undulating green canopy.”
Struthers’s poems are not about nature, but they exist within it and
draw strength from it.