Driven

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Betsy Struthers’s fifth collection of poems is grouped into four
sections: “Father,” “Son,” “Body,” and “Soul.” The first
two deal with the death of the poet’s father and the growing up of her
son, and the welter of feelings each of these transitions brings.
Struthers writes in “Waking My Father” of a “keening in my ears so
/ high and pure it should / have cracked his stillness. / But it could
not. / And has not.” And in the poem “Keeping Mum”: “I am sick
of this mute grieving, confusing the loss / of my father for my son.”

Other poems give words to the thoughts of our own aging and mortality
that another’s death or growth brings. “In Middle Age” concludes:
“We / are the ones in the room at the end / of the hall, reading in
bed. Our / cold feet entangled.”

The “Body” poems build on these themes of death, growth, and aging,
while the “Soul” section stands apart; its 13 poems are based on the
life and faith of Henry Alline, an itinerant preacher in 18th-century
Nova Scotia and a distant relation to Struthers.

This collection, like Struthers’s earlier work, is at once intensely
personal, yet accessible. And the language occasionally crackles, as
when someone “combs the sand for oyster / shells, clams cracked by /
gulls greedy for those gray / and wrinkled tongues.”