Another End of the Road

Olga Costopoulos teaches English at the University of Alberta.

Those of us familiar with Mary T. McDonald’s poems are delighted to
see a collection in print. It was long overdue. The poems here are
honest, unpretentious, and very carefully worked. Most are reminiscences
of a Depression-era child, spent as an inmate of too many rural
teacherages. They evoke the whole period, from dippers in water pails to
the stark, drought-scorched prairies. But they do so without any trace
of sentimentality. The poet has an unerring eye for the telling detail
that illuminates a whole scene or reveals a character in sharp relief.
One feels a close acquaintance, if not kinship, with the speaker’s
Aunt Ellen, an indomitable old-style lady who wears a woollen bathing
suit and sews for the local burghers’ wives. The individual experience
is universalized in these finely wrought poems, which transcend their
time and place.