Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women's Poetry

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

The 10 essays in this collection, most of which were previously
published, have all been extensively revised and expanded. They are
organized around “three moments in feminist ecocritical
consciousness”: poetic, ecological, and ecocritical consciousness. The
author prefaces the essays with “A Literary History of Nature,” an
introduction that traces the myth of Mother Nature/Mother Earth from the
Mespotamian creation myth to postmodernist theory. Along the way, she
suggests “it’s better sometimes to ignore the rigidity of [those
male-devised] categories altogether.” The essays that follow
convincingly demonstrate the appropriateness of that suggestion.

In the first section, consisting of essays on Atwood, Pickthall, and
Skinner, Relke is concerned with the poet’s search for subjectivity in
a literary landscape where women who are poets of nature are constrained
by convention and construct. In the second section, Relke discusses how
three very different writers—Livesay, Crawford, and
Marlatt—understand and use language to speak to ecological concerns.
The final section focuses “more directly on the critical act itself,
and on the masculine construction of Canadian literary history,” with
essays on Webb, P.K. Page, and Dumont.

The essays are written in a personable and accessible style; they are
interdisciplinary in nature and each develops yet another dimension of
feminist ecocriticism with close readings of Canadian women poets whose
work stretches out over more than a century. Greenwor(l)ds is a timely
and significant contribution to the study of Canadian literature; to
gender, environmental, and cultural studies; and to feminist criticism
and criticism of women’s writing. It is also an invitation to begin,
as Relke says in her final essay, “rewriting the real as real.”