tion to understanding not only the life and peg Telegram in protest when she was honesties. Secret passions for other girls workof Elizabeth Smart but the growth of made "part secretary and part women's in her school years, an abortion performed the realm of art as a place where women page editor," there was undoubtedly more by a comrade-doctor in the 1930s -but might live and even prosper. to "FRL" than her traditional Protestant especially thechapter on Gina (GinaWatts upbringing. This "bag of tricks" -as she Lawson), her fellow "bluestocking" and was called by her husband, who also beat one of her closest friends. In this chapter, JOURNEY WITH MY SELVES: A her on one drunken occasion -was con- Livesay addresses her friend as if she MEMOIR 1909-1963 strained more by marriage and mother- were still alive and in her presence: "Ah hood in patriarchal society than by her Gina, is it only after seventy years of Dorothy Livesay. ~: own prudishness. This, perhaps, is the living that I begin to understand you?" Douglas & McIntyre, 1991. realization Livesay recalls having when Through excerpts from interviews with she remembers reading her mother's dia- Gina, from Livesay's girlhood diary and By Jennifer Henderson ries shortly after her death: ". ..I came to from letters between the two friends, we know that she had been, in her own way, learn of the tremendous love between two "Many are the ways of telling the truth. afeminist. Afeminist, but sadlyrestricted." girls who were "started out on a direction There is his way and her way and now, my This autobiography overlaps somewhat completely the opposite from that of our way." With these words, Dorothy Livesay with an earlier collection of memoirs from fellow classmates." Witty and daring Gina, introduces her reconstruction of the trou- the 1930s: Right Hand Left Hand, pub- with whom Livesay discovered Elinor bled relationship between her parents. But lished by Porcepic in 1977.That book was Wylie, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Katherine these words also frame the narrative of her an attempt to recount the politicizing ef- Mansfield and Emily Dickinson, was own life in Journey With My Selves, a fect of the Depression on Livesay as a clearly an impetus to her early writing. collage of memories recounting the po- student at the , her Livesay's friendships and associations et's lifelong struggle to find her own way. involvement with the Communist Party in with writers and literary figures such as No one who has read her poetry, spanning Canadaand her experiments with agitprop. Alan Crawley, , Earle sixty years and never ceasing to re-invent Reading Journey With My Selves, I Birney and Malcolm Lowry give shape to itself, will argue that she has not suc- experienced the same discomfort with much of this autobiography. In a sense, ceeded in doing just that. Livesay's lack of self-analysis that I had she is writing the narrative of her writing: The journey begins with an attempt to felt reading the earlier autobiography. In with her poems, articles and letters in come to terms with the extraordinary in- neither account does she come to terms front of her, she recalls the inspiration fluence of parents with diametrically op- with her class privilege -growing up in behind a poem, or the influence at a cer- posed personalities: "JFB" Livesay is a middle-class family, attending a private tain moment in her writing, and these faithfully remembered by his daughter- school in Toronto, studying in France - details become part of the story. in hisown words-as aaradical, one who and thus her approach to radical politics Not long ago in , a woman was goes to the root of things." while "FRL" seems rather naive, at best a liberal-hu- forced to give up her professional career (Florence Randall Livesay) is remem- manist approach to socialism. as soon as she was married; in the late bered as a prudish woman constrained by But if some of the old gaps reappear in 1930s,Livesay had to give up her job as a her Victorian mentality. The young this book, there are also some new social worker with theB.C. WelfareField Dorothy Livesay was, for her mother, a Service in order to make room for the promising 'lady-poet.' Her father had dif- employment of married men. She would ferent plans: he wanted a daughter who subsequently teach in schools and univer- would think like Emma Goldman and sities and work for Unesco in , but write novels like George Eliot. being forced into unemployment at this "Inheritance," a poem written by early stage was devastating for a young Livesay as a tribute to her father after his woman who was full of energy. death, begins with the line: "In the rooms The situation did give her more time to of my mind you pace." Indeed it is "JFB" write however, and it was during this with whom she allies herself - even period that Livesay helped establish the when her engagement in left-wing activi- literary journal, Contemporary Verse. ties becomes a little too much for the Having children made it difficult to find manager of the Canadian Press. It was her the time to write, but she continued. "I mother - a writer in her own right and a was still writing poems, time snatched in translator of Slavic literature- however, the basement supervising an old washing who first pushed the young poet to get her machine with hand wringer, or waiting work published. until everyone was asleep to put on a The relationship between Livesay and record and write to music." Livesay's her mother is, among all the relationships husband, Duncan McNair, was support- recalled in this book. the most interesting. ive of her writing- like her father, he was A woman who refused to say the word "an advocate of women as creative be- "obey" at her Anglican wedding cer- ings." ("All this I was sure of," she writes, emony, and who left her job at the Winni- "until there were children, household du-

VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2 ties and a very small income.") male friend in middle age, splendour Widowhood is a new lease on life for enough for a newly mythologized sky. Dorothy Livesay. Finding herself sud- - Scheier's revisionist mythmaking in Sky denly free from responsibility to family, f!!jflf$ff, is harder to read. It is both a tough pieceof and able to do things solely for herself, she work and arewarding one. Framed as this finds that long sought-for "my way." She poem is in sky, water, earth, and fire - travels, she loves, and she continues to - - - Aristotle's elements-Skyreminds me of write. story of the "man in the pulpit (who) Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, a work quotes Jesus & Shakespeare to prove the in whichLevi, who was trainedasachem- world/is still round a perfect circle in/ ist, tells how he used his work to survive God's eye.. ." is eclipsed. Story is arecur- a death camp during the Second World AGNES IN THE SKY rent trope throughout the four sections of War. Like Levi's prose memoir I read her book. It is introduced in the first sec- Scheier's poem as a survivor's account of . : Turnstone Press, tion in "3 poems for Agnes." In the third a nightmare time: for Levi the War, for 1990. section of the book "if I told even a sliver Scheier a two year period, from age five to of what i knowlwho would listen" we find seven, when she lived in fear of "Alan SKY: A Poem in Four Pieces poems which demonstrateeloquentlyhow Turchin the child rapistfat 1504 Ocean the old patterns of belief have failed both Avenue in Brooklyn New York/Alan Libby Scheier. Stratford, : daughters and sons. Turchin the son of the superintendent.. .." Mercury Press, 1990. In "Scapegoat" "what the story was" is Scheier is insistent that the reader make notably set in the past tense. The "Scape- a distinction between fiction and her own goat" is, after all, a requisite figure in the truth claim. In "Earth Per Verse" therecord old religious order which is left behind. In is set in the poem: "I am alone and my Both Di Brandt's Agnes in the Sky and that mythology, the poem tells us, the name isLibby not Jenny and this recounts Libby Scheier's Sky are works of matu- most prized victims were "most of all eventdthat happened". rity, books which revise what Ann Sexton mothers/sweet white ghost mothers cheer- In Scheier's work the "tiny mouth/tell- called "the middle age witch me." The fully/sacrificing themselves to the world/ ing what happened telling the adults the speaking subject in Brandt's poetry, her denying themselves into goodness." protectors" solicits no response, "noth- "i" and Scheier's "I"-"LS ," demonstrate ThroughoutAgnesinthe Sky the speaking ing.. ." happened ". ..from the telling". what Alicia Ostricker's Stealing the Lan- subject is the transgressing female, a sur- There are no periods or commas within guage: The Emergence of Women's Po- vivor who "wasn't your mother.. . (and) this section of the poem. One feels that the etry calls "revisionist mythmaking," a didn't die like she did.. .." The "i" of these nightmare of being abused, and fearing process by which "the poet simultane- poems remembers what has happened, abuse, has no end. Even so the "telling" ously deconstructs aprior 'myth' or 'story' but is painfully aware that her record is which this text so carefully contains con- and reconstructs a new one which in- not the authorized version. She is "the one stitutes a textual body where the poet cludes, instead of excludes herself. who hoards the family/stories secretly performs a healing ritual with words. The Sky is present in the title of both works, who feels herlway in the dark the one who unprotected child can "tell" once more and significantly in each it constitutes the has1110 right.. .." The telling of story - and this time be soothed by Scheier's physical and psychic tenitory where both whether of self or of others - is still, in adult "I7' with her "kind adult-woman books re-vision myth. In Brandt's case itself, a transgressive act. mouth." the prior myth is of the Christian God, Women's stories arenewly inscribed in As Scheier and Brandt write they tres- Lord of both heaven and carth in her Brandt's "sky." "Agnes" is a neighbour pass into the territory of the cultural and Mennonite youth, the "God who is who has died with "no one to care about/ biological fathers who once held power watching&. ..sees/everything." Scheier's the story.. ." of her lost love and "endless over them. In their maturity they face "the Sky: A Poem in Four Pieces begins with a forgiving." Her "priest" has given her a dead father" (Brandt) and the live one fist section which evokes the scientific mythology of "the Virgin blessing heaven/ (Scheier) with both anger and absolution. verities - the Prolegomena - of past with her tears ...." But in the "haven/ They face their own middle age with generations of intellectual men. But her heaven" refigured in this work of revi- uncompromising hunger for self expres- "Prolegomena" is "Sky Narratives: Pro- sionist mythmaking Agnes is to find not a sion and beauty. They place what they legomena toany Future Sociology of Sky," chaste spiritual reunion with God the fa- need in their poems: ". ..give me more and what its speaker knows is that "we ther, but "some holy black prince/caress- give me/more than stones i want red rasp- know only that we don't know ...." The ing her broken spirit bones/into light.. .." berries" writes Di Brandt, "& wild roses next three sections of Scheier's long poem In this work Christian cosmology suf- blooming in the snow. .." and later she are "Ocean," "Earth Per Verse," and fers a sea-change. The old story is fin- writes "i want the huge narrativelof the "Fire." In "Fire" she couples death with ished. The "i" and the "you" of these river thecurvedcry of theland.. .." Scheier rebirth, offering a creation myth by which poems love men and yet actively privilege writes "I want" as a chant in one poem the speaking subject is able to "let the old the female line, "the tears of a woman/ summoning the power "to write," and "to ways gopet them burnpet the fires burn/ might cry in middle age afterla lifetime of rememberlthe dreams that draw me here." cover everything with ash." swallowing them .:.." They find in the Both books are valuable works of revi- In Di Brandt's Agnes in the Sky the old lonely spinster, the aging mother, the fe- sionist mythmaking. I celebrate them.

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESLES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME