I had missed this book but, in one of those odd coincidences, my son brought it home one day and the next day the Globe and Mail got five literary types to list the top ten Canadian books and this book appeared on three of the lists.

I don't know who is harder on whom: young people on old people or old people on young people. The old think the young are naive and the young think the old don't have a feeling in their heart or a thought in their head. This is a young person's book. It doesn't read like any other 1945 book you'll ever read (or, in fact, like any other book I've read) and for that alone I'm glad I have read it. Raw, melodramatic, devastated and poetic. ( )

A prose poem of exquisite beauty, a tale of the overwhelming love of an intelligent, articulate woman for a man unworthy of her, a long drawn-out howl in the service of the idea that love can change the world for the better while simultaneously causing grief and mayhem wherever it goes. This is a flawless work, eloquent and moving and in some ways profoundly disturbing. Smart's writing is like fire dancing and flickering - beautiful and terrible in equal measure. Although those readers who like the simpleton A-to-B plotting that dominates so much of modern literature will perhaps find nothing here to like this is a hugely impressive achievement. English has such a massive vocabulary and flexibility to it yet there are few writers who take advantage of that to produce something that stretches the language to breaking point in the service of communicating depth and truth of experience. Anyone who loves language, who loves writing, who loves the idea that words on the page can be more than simple fireside tales writ large, should be thanking whatever deity they believe in every day that people like Elizabeth Smart chose to enter the ring and fight hard to put words on the page. This is a classic, and rightly so, and anyone who picks it up and remains unmoved should perhaps consider seeking professional help. ( )

One for the Morrissey fans out there, maybe. ( )

A marvellous book that I have heard about, but never read until now when I picked it up at the Book and Art Den in Banff; a very good little bookstore with an excellent selection of books, much better than one would expect from such a tourist mecca.

Smart was an interesting, and intriguing person. Born in Ottawa, she moved to England where she fell in love with a poet named George Barker. She did so by reading his poetry, not by meeting him. She struck-up a correspondence, and ended up inviting Barker and his wife to join her in California. She in fact paid for their trip as Barker was penniless. She and Barker began an affair that lasted a lifetime (and four children), much to the disapproval of her family, friends, and the authorities who arrested the two of them for adultery when they tried to drive across the state border (this was in the 1950s). Barker, it seems went back to his wife, for a while, when Smart was pregnant with their first child.

That is the bare bones of the story that is told in this little book through a genre called "poetic prose". And it is wonderful. Almost every line is a metaphor, a poetic image, but it works. And in some passages, Smart writes beautifully:

...he whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets and the bags, and shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.

Absolve me, I prayed, up through the cathedral redwoods, and forgive me if this is sin. But the new moss caressed me and the water over my feet and the ferns approved me with endearments: My darling, my darling, lie down with us now for you also are earth whom nothing but love can sow.
And I lay down on the redwood needles and seemed to flow down the canyon with the thunder and confusion of the stream, in a happiness which, like birth, can afford to ignore the blood and the tearing. For nature has no time for mourning, absorbed by the turning world, and will, no matter what devastation attacks her, fulfil in underground ritual, all her proper prophecy.

Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate.

And, one of my favourites, that I should take to heart:

Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom, grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

(Though I might change "regrets" for "hopes")