Elizabeth Brewster

Biography

One of only a few female modernist poets to publish in Canadian little magazines during the

1940s, Elizabeth Brewster is perhaps the most celebrated poet to have emerged from the Bliss

Carman Society (BCS). Brewster was born in the small logging community of Chipman, New

Brunswick, in 1922. Having come from an impoverished background, she dropped out of public

school at a young age because she did not have warm clothing to wear during the winter. On the

strength of her intelligence and self-education, however, she attended the University of New

Brunswick from 1942-46. There she became a member of the BCS and played an integral role in

the founding of The Fiddlehead. During her time as a member of the BCS, Brewster’s poetry

appeared frequently in The Fiddlehead and was principally modernist, displaying imagistic

clarity and careful precision. After her first collection of poetry, East Coast (1951), Brewster’s

verse became increasingly personal. The themes of place, memory, and emotion are at the center

of her work. Employing colloquial language and restraining her use of metaphor, simile, and

allusion, Brewster’s poetry has at its core a tough honesty. Her preoccupation with self-identity

and the personal, as well as her modest and conversational tone, distances her poetry from the

high (and more intellectual) modernism of her early mentor, Alfred Bailey, and invites

comparison with that of her good friend and contemporary poet Alden Nowlan. In addition to

nearly twenty books of poetry, Brewster also published seven works of fiction, making her not

only one of New Brunswick’s greatest writers, but also one of the most prolific.

For a much more detailed biography of Brewster, see The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia

at http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/b/brewster_elizabeth.html

Why Should We Read and Study Brewster?

As an early member of the Bliss Carman Society, Brewster was key to the founding of

Canada’s longest-running literary magazine, The Fiddlehead, which played an integral

role in re-establishing Fredericton as a center for literary activity in Canada. Though she

did not edit The Fiddlehead, her significance in the Bliss Carman Society speaks to the

immense but all too often overlooked contribution Canadian women poets made to

literature and literary publishing in New Brunswick and Canada generally.

Brewster is also an important transitional figure between modernism and later poetic

forms in New Brunswick. While her early verse is definably modernist, her poetry of the

1950s and beyond pioneered a confessional voice that was new to New Brunswick and

Canadian poetry. As such, her poetry is illustrative of the evolution of New Brunswick’s

literature, an evolution that both reflected and responded to the changing social and

political environment of the province.

Brewster, finally, is one of those poets whose work is immediately accessible. Her poems

are direct and always crafted to speak to the heart. Louis Dudek, one of the deans of

Canadian poetry, said that readers should consider themselves privileged to be invited

into the private world of an artist’s thought. Readers of Brewster’s work walk along with

her in that way, recognizing in her thoughts many of their own experiences and emotions.

Literature & Analysis

“The Silent Scream”

When I was seven, playing by myself

near the edge of the woods,

I was almost buried in a pile of sawdust

that gave way spongily into quicksand.

As I sank up to my neck, struggling,

I opened my mouth to scream.

But my voice had gone.

I got out. I survived. Did not tell my mother

Or anyone else for over twenty years.

Dreamed, however,

many times of being buried alive,

nose and mouth choked with earth or sawdust,

no voice ever

because I could not scream.

I wonder if that is why all the reviewers

say I am such a quiet poet.

“The Young Girl Waits for Love”

Love grows within her like a flowering tree

that blossoms at her mouth; she feels its branches

stretching along her veins, and all its leaves

shivering and prickling at her fingertips.

She carries love in her body through the streets

like blossoming cherry, delicate daffodil

wrapped from the winter cold.

At night she feels the January sheets

grow warmer with her love.

She and her unknown lover swim in dreams

on seas where stars float like fat golden fish.

Delight and fear

tingle together with the water’s touch.

They sink into dark caverns, submarine,

to die a hundred deaths and rise again,

floating like seaweed on the rising tide.

They lie all day on daisies, and at night

dance to the moon’s pale music, silently.

“Return of the Native”

This is the true land of fairy tales,

this countryside of sullen beauty

heavy beneath dark trees. The brown smell of wood

lingers about it. Sawdust penetrates

every corner. You smell it, mixed with manure,

in the restaurant with its moosehead, or, like dim must,

in the little movie house.

The short street swims in dust and sunshine, slides

into a country road and crosses the bridge

across the log-filled river where men walk,

balancing on the logs, and a single rowboat

holds a group of boys, their dark, round heads

bent close together. Sunshine, wind and water

carry together the floating smell of boards.

Across the bridge is pasture; later, woods.

This is a land

not settled yet by its generations of settlers.

Wildness still lingers, and the unfriendly trees

suffer, but do not shelter, man, their neighbour.

No Eden this, with parks and friendly beasts,

though hopeful settlers, not far distant, called

their country Canaan, New Jerusalem,

or even Beulah. Yet beauty here is solemn,

with the freshness of some strange and morning world.

At the last house on the edge of the woods, two children

sit on their swings, reading aloud to each other

a fairy tale of children in a wood.

Their mother, hanging up her Monday wash,

stops for a minute and watches flying over

the shining crows flapping their heavy wings.

“Where I Come From”

People are made of places. They carry with them

hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace

or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities

how different drops from them, like the smell of smog

or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring,

nature tidily plotted with a guidebook;

or the smell of work, glue factories maybe,

chromium-plated offices; smell of subways

crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people

carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods;

blueberry patches in the burned-out bush;

wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint,

with yards where hens and chickens circle about,

clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses

behind which violets grow. Spring and winter

are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows

a frosty wind from fields of snow.

“River Song”

Where are the lumberjacks who came from the woods for

Christmas,

Drinking, fighting, singing their endless ballads,

Eating pork and pancakes for breakfast, gravy dripping over?

Where are their wives, milking the cows in winter

Slopping out to the barn in rubber boots,

Shovelling out the snow drifts?

Churning, baking the crisp-scented bread in huge loaves?

Bearing their ten children?

Where is the shrill scream of the mill whistle,

The smell of a town built on sawdust and pine shavings?

Where are the logs afloat on the wide river?

Oh sad river,

Sing a song of pain for your children gone,

Oh glory gone.

“Atlantic Development”

Three abandoned churches in a row;

tombstones behind them hidden by waving timothy;

a farmhouse with broken panes,

still shielded by limp curtains, dark with dust;

further along the road, a deserted mineshaft.

In the neighbouring village

the only young men on the street are these granite soldiers

carved on the war memorial in front of the Post Office.

Analysis

“Return of the Native,” “Where I Come From,” “River Song,” and “Atlantic

Development”

Each of these poems is clearly and consciously about place – specifically the place of Brewster’s

youth around Chipman, New Brunswick. That place, we are told in “Return of the Native,” is

“the true land of fairy tales,” a place of “sullen” and “solemn” beauty that is “not settled yet by

its generations of settlers.” It is a place where “unfriendly trees / suffer, but do not shelter, man,

their neighbour.” It is a place, then, of danger and ominousness where people live precariously

on the edge of woods and waters. Still, for all its impenetrable mystery, it is a place, like Fred

Cogswell’s “New Brunswick,” that imprints itself on people so that “they carry woods in their

minds,” “blueberry patches,” and old “wooden farmhouses.”

Mostly, however, it is a place of memory, for, as “River Song” and “Atlantic Development”

make clear, it is a place that has been footnoted to history. Its farms and logging industries no

longer vibrant or productive, and many of its people gone to urban centres, it exists most fully in

the minds of former residents – and most colourfully in the imagination of the poet. Such has

been the fate of many places in rural Canada and New Brunswick, and so we are deeply indebted

to artists like Brewster who preserve what once was vital and real.

But that act of recording is only at the surface of each of these four poems. The deeper inference

is that what was in the past was no less important than what is in the present. The communities

and neighbourhoods that are fully relevant today in the lives of people are differently configured

than in the past, but no more essential or important. In fact, the inference is that they may be less

essential, certainly less colourful. In moving rapidly to cities, people have become differently

imprinted, but are they better served, happier, more fully alive and challenged? That is debatable.

What is clear is that the rural world that now sits largely abandoned was no one-dimensional

plane of hard work and scant reward. Yes, it did demand excruciating effort for little reward,

often testing the sanity of inhabitants, but meeting those demands took a distinct courage and

nobility that Brewster’s poems of place celebrate. It is that nobility that she remembers about her

parents, despite her father’s tattered coat (“Thirty Below”) and her mother’s dreams of hope

(“Inheritance”). Moreover, it is that nobility – that indefinable social capital, the “glory gone” –

that New Brunswick loses every time another of its villages is abandoned.

The challenge for us all, students and citizens of New Brunswick, is to shout this to the rafters,

mourning these losses as deeply and publicly as we mourn the passing of loved ones. We must

never passively accept, Brewster implies, the loss of our communities as the inevitable change to

“national” or “global” systems. Nor must we passively accept our “given” roles as standing

reserve – either as raw material for imperial armies or a desperate pool of mobile labourers. Our

legacy must not be that of “granite soldiers” memorialized in front of a Post Office, one of the

many crown corporations in Canada centralized in Ontario. We may, in the end, not be able to

stop the global economic tide, but we can certainly be vocal about articulating what is being lost.

Too long have we been silenced on the sidelines, made to believe that such change was in our

best interest or out of the control of our political representatives. We must start to act before the

entirety of our province is turned to the folklore and footnote of “Atlantic Development.”

At the same time, Brewster reminds us, we must be careful not to romanticize a past that had its

share of hardships. The near-slavery of men and women in harness to the “shrill scream of the

mill whistle” and “[b]earing their ten children” (“River Song”) is a reminder that we must see

history fully, otherwise we misrepresent ourselves. These four poems are thus cautionary tales,

their message one of pain and lament – and, importantly, that neither the past nor the present

recollection of that past should be built on anything as flimsy as “sawdust and pine shavings.”

“Thirty Below”

The prairie wind sounds colder

than any wind I have ever heard.

Looking through frosted windows

I see snow whirl in the street

and think how deep

all over the country now

snow drifts

and cars are stuck

on icy roads.

A solitary man walking

wraps his face in a woollen mask,

turns his back sometimes

so as not to front

this biting, eye-smarting wind.

Suddenly I see my dead father

in an old coat too thin for him,

the tabs of his cap pulled over his ears,

on a drifted road in New Brunswick

walking with bowed head

towards home.

Analysis

“Thirty Below”

Though a number of writers from New Brunswick have written about exile, one of our negative

cultural signatures, few have done so as sensitively as Elizabeth Brewster. Her treatment of the

subject is always psychological, focussing on how exile fragments the self and tortures the soul.

Both those consequences of exile appear in “Thirty Below.” The informing consciousness of the

poem (perhaps the poet’s itself) ruminates on a biting Prairie cold, but does so removed and thus

protected from it. She looks through frosted windows that divide her from the world she is

observing. What she sees is a solitary figure trying to ward off the cold, a futile effort at best.

The struggle to stay warm reminds her “Suddenly” of her father, always poor and put upon, who

trudges toward home. He, too, is cold and unaccompanied on the road.

And there the poem ends. But is that all? If we conclude that it is not, then what else is being

implied? What are we being asked to think about? Because Brewster does not make it clear, we

are rather limited in our choices, especially if we want to remain true to the text itself.

At base, then, the poem suggests that the past assaults the mind, even the safe and sheltered mind

(the mind behind glass, preserved and warm). But the poem infers strongly that no mind can ever

be sheltered and safe – and none, as Fred Cogswell’s magnificent poem “New Brunswick” says,

can ever “escape the source that feeds its sap.” Nothing “outgrows its roots.”

To live in exile, then, is to live under siege. Not from external forces but from memories of the

past: memories of home and formative experiences. To live in exile is also to live divided, as if

behind glass. It is to watch not with longing but with regret, and to “Sing a song of pain for your

children gone, / Oh glory gone” (“River Song”). These are the consequences and emotions of a

broken federalism: to live divided inside oneself. To be a foreigner in one’s own country.

Brewster’s importance is in reminding us that exile is not just a socio-economic phenomenon –

the normal dictates of an amoral corporate culture and globalized world – but also an emotional

experience that injures the heart.

“Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods”

No, I’m not used to it yet, though it’s over forty years.

My husband was a soldier in the War,

came from these parts. You know how it was in the War.

We were sorry for the boys so far from home,

and England was dreary then, with all the rationing,

and the cold, and the shortages. This country sounded good,

and Ed looked good in uniform. He said I’d never be sorry.

Look at all those woods. Ed thought it pretty country,

but I never got used to all that fir and spruce

and the trees going on for miles and miles.

Not the kind of woods you walk in, like at home.

I used to walk in the woods when I first came over,

go out and sing to myself there, but they thought I was crazy,

and so I stopped. My, how I used to cry

back in those early days. Some women went back;

but there – I’d married Ed, and I’d stick by him.

Well, he was a good man in his way,

never got drunk to speak of, never swore

when I was around. He couldn’t help the country

being the way it is.

What I really wanted

was something, now, like Brighton.

I had a holiday there when I was young –

stayed nearly a week – that was a jolly time.

Brighton was grand. That’s when I was in service

not far from there. But there’s nothing like that here.

Look at the dark, how it’s come on so sudden.

They have no twilight here, as they have at home.

She dips and is gone. There are no softnesses,

but only black and brightness.

No, even the violets here don’t have the smell

they did at home, when you walked down the road

in the April night and smelled them.

Now that Ed’s gone, I think sometimes of going

back home and seeing it. But I’m afraid

maybe the country isn’t what it was.

I wouldn’t know my sisters. All my children

live in these parts. And maybe –

I don’t know –

when I got over there I’d miss the woods.

Analysis

“Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods”

During the Second World War an estimated 48,000 British and European women married

Canadian servicemen. After the war, most of these “war brides” came to Canada where they

faced a difficult cultural transition. For those coming from cities in Britain and Europe, rural life

in Canada was not what they had expected. Brewster’s “Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick

Woods” is a poem about one such war bride. Considered one of Brewster’s finest works, it is a

poem of voice. Written in a conversational first person style, its modulated voice reveals the

feelings of nostalgia and regret experienced by the war bride. The meaning of the poem is best

discerned when read aloud and slowly (even ruminatively), for, when heard, the contours,

cadences, pauses, and pace of the voice reveal the emotions of the elderly woman.

The beginning of the poem reads like the answer to a question. We know from the title that the

speaker is a woman travelling on a bus, and the opening prompts us to imagine the woman being

asked by a fellow passenger of her experience moving from England to rural New Brunswick.

What follows is the woman’s answer: a monologue in which the speaker attempts to rationalize

and justify her move while recollecting and idealizing her youth in England.

Even after forty years the woman is not used to living in the backwoods of New Brunswick.

Nevertheless, she has plenty of reasons why she married a Canadian soldier and moved from

England: the British took pity on the soldiers, “England was dreary then,” they had to endure

strict rationing of food and material goods, it was cold, and there were food shortages. But

Canada also sounded nice; Ed, her husband from the New Brunswick woods, “looked good in

uniform”; and, finally, Ed convinced her that she would “never be sorry.”

The second stanza begins with a signpost: we are reminded that the speaker is on a bus when she

comments, “look at all those woods.” In addition to strengthening the conversational feel of the

poem, these signposts help to draw us into the conversation. Further down, in the fifth stanza, we

get another: “Look at the dark,” says the woman, “how it’s come on so sudden.” While these

signposts draw us into the poem, they also open the possibility that the speaker is talking to

herself and shoring up her arguments. Each time she observes the passing landscape, something

in the New Brunswick woods evokes a memory of its opposite, a memory of England. These

woods, she states matter-of-factly, “are not the kind of woods you walk in, like at home.”

We also get an image of her husband Ed. He was a good man “in his way”; he sinned, but not in

her presence, “never swore / when I was around”; and, as if repeating the words of Ed himself,

“he couldn’t help the country / being the way it is.” Her defense of Ed, though, is not nearly as

convincing as her yearning for Brighton, a quaint sea-side borough in southeast England that was

one of the most popular resorts in the country. Falling back into the language of her youth, she

mourns that there is nothing “jolly” or “grand” about rural New Brunswick. Her nostalgia for

bygone England swells as she remembers the smell of the violets, a smell that is absent from the

violets in New Brunswick.

After forty years, the speaker still identifies England as her “home” – or does she? As the poem

progresses we get a sense that this woman is torn between homes, longing for a past to which she

cannot return and unable to leave a place, New Brunswick, which will never measure up to the

England of her youth. The more she reminisces on her past, the more fantastic and unreal her

memory becomes until she begins to admit, albeit hesitantly, the illusory nature of her English

home: “I’m afraid / maybe the country isn’t what it was.” Of course, the country can’t be what it

was because all places change with time. What is more, it is only in our dreams and memories

that violets in one country smell differently than violets in another; nostalgia, Brewster teaches

us, clouds both our memories of the past and our perceptions of the present. The poem ends with

the speaker revealing an attachment she is afraid to admit, again, as much to herself as to us:

“And maybe – / I don’t know – / when I got over there I’d miss the woods.”

The poem is one of multiple journeys: a bus journey through the New Brunswick woods, a

journey into the speaker’s past, a journey from England to New Brunswick, and a journey from

the foreign to the familiar. Ultimately, the speaker regrets having left her home in England, but

she also recognizes that the woods of New Brunswick have become her home – what was once

foreign has now become familiar, and vice versa. Her existence is thus contradictory and

precarious: she cannot stand to stay in New Brunswick, but neither can she leave. The poem,

then, expresses the perennial New Brunswick conundrum, one as real today as it was in the time

of this war bride. As such, the poem captures what might be understood as a profound sympathy

for humanity: an ability to recognize and communicate those feelings of nostalgia and regret that

are common to nearly anyone who has had the experience of leaving one home and attempting to

establish another. Like “Thirty Below,” the poem is a meditation on the nature of exile and

reconciliation.

It is her ability to convey these profound insights to her readers that has secured Brewster’s place

in the history of New Brunswick literature, but it is her mastery of rhythm and tone – her ability

to so perfectly adopt the voice of her subjects – that has earned Brewster a place among

Canada’s greatest poets.

Inheritance

1

As a child I overheard my deaf father

talking to himself, wondering

where the next meal was coming from, saying

“All’s lost,” saying

“What will we do?”

Saying, “They’d be better off without me.”

And I followed him about dumbly,

wishing to say “I love you”

fearing where he might walk

or what he might do

wishing to make him successful

brilliant and admired,

and not this shabby man

with mended trousers

and scuffed shoes

stumbling apologetically about the house.

2

He was a good man, my father,

a childlike man,

never given to violence, afraid of blood,

afraid of hurting others, a gentle man;

yet I think I was ashamed of him a little

because he never won in life,

also because he tried to comfort himself

by pretending to despise those who prospered,

and because he talked too loudly

and repeated the same jokes many times.

But I could never cut him out of myself,

my argumentative, mild father,

arrogant and timid.

Sometimes lately

I find I also repeat the same jokes.

3

My mother was always hunting for four-leaf clovers,

and, since her eyes were quick, she found many.

They were stuffed in all her books and Bibles,

but she complained to me once

that they did not bring her luck.

I repeated her words to a neighbour

and she rebuked me later.

“Never tell anyone outside the family”

she warned me then,

“that any of us don’t think we are lucky.”

4

Green was my mother’s favourite colour,

colour of grass and hope.

All her life she wanted

a green velvet dress

and never had one.

“Reasons For Reason”

My father used to tell me

that one of his first memories

was of walking past the old Saint John Asylum

beneath the window of a girl

who shook the bars

and screamed,

“I’ll kill you, boy!

Boy, I’ll kill you!”

And my mother sometimes showed me the scar

that Cousin Bethiah made

when she went crazy

and chased my mother around the kitchen table

with a butcher knife

before the uncles caught her

and she was taken away

and when I was a child

I read in the Saint John paper

the investigations of that asylum

the lock-and-bolt treatments

the filth, the blows, the straitjackets

so of course I try

to be as reasonable myself as possible,

make sure the butcher knife

is not too sharp

and put it away

as soon as I can

after carving

“In Favour of Being Alive”

Twenty-four years ago

I tried to kill myself

but with my usual incompetence

did not manage to.

Not even one good poem

out of it.

Obviously

I was no Sylvia Plath.

I don’t know

why I write about it now

(and even now

I am not giving details)

except maybe I write

for hortatory or didactic reasons

to say to someone

Don’t!

It’s been a dull life

much of the time

but lots better

than no life at all.

You don’t know how much

you may yet enjoy

just waking up

and peeling oranges

to eat with sugar

while you listen to the clock strike

down at the Town Hall

telling you again

that you’re still here

and Sylvia Plath isn’t.

“On Becoming An Ancestor”

Too late in life

for children, the building

of flesh and bone

out of flesh and bone,

all that blood and guts

other women talk of.

By chance or intention

whatever touching

of body or mind

came too late.

Not my fault, it seems to me,

I would have liked

I think

Or maybe I was scared.

Many things scared me.

Does it matter?

Flesh becomes

the green blood of grass.

Poems disintegrate

to their original syllables.

There is no avoiding

the process of transformation,

of becoming

a sort of ancestor,

like the lovers in old songs

from whose buried mouths

grew briars and roses.

My fears were unnecessary

but after all did not change

the end result

which (whether I fear or hope)

is not an end

Questions and Considerations for Reflection

► Brewster’s “Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods” and “Return of the Native” are

deeply concerned with the role of memory in the formation of thought and perception. In this

way, both poems are similar to, and may respond to, Charles G.D. Roberts’s “The Tantramar

Revisited.” Though some readers of these poems may not have had the experience of leaving

home, they will likely have had feelings of nostalgia – for certain experiences in their childhood,

for a place they might have visited as a child, for a loved one they have lost, or for a range of

other people, places, or events of their past. How do the poems of Brewster and Roberts convey

those feelings? How does the experience of nostalgia described by Brewster and Roberts differ

from one another, one being the reflections of an aging man returning home, the other the

memories of elderly women remembering their youth in and away from New Brunswick? To

what extent are the feelings of exile and regret related to New Brunswick, a have-not province

that people must leave, or to a new post-war globalism that people are encouraged to embrace?

► “Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods” does not provide a flattering portrait of New

Brunswick. In fact, it seems to reinforce notions of New Brunswick as a rural and unappealing

wilderness. How does the poem reflect our own perceptions of New Brunswick? At the same

time, how does the poem capture the sense of home and rootedness we experience in spite of the

negative aspects of living in New Brunswick? Is Brewster suggesting that New Brunswick is an

unappealing place to live, or is she using her speaker to reveal something more complex at work?

► Just as Brewster seems to be channelling Roberts in “Woman on a Bus” and “Return of the

Native,” so does she seem to be channelling Kay Smith in “The Young Girl Waits for Love” and

“On Becoming an Ancestor.” Brewster’s poems are reminiscent of Smith’s poems of young girls

and old women. Both poets treat the world of the female imagination as it traverses youth and

old age. How is the female imagination, evident in Brewster and Smith, different from the male

imagination evident in, say, Roberts’s “The Tantramar Revisited”?

► The final image of the crow at the close of “Return of the Native” also conjures the memory

of a similar image of a crow at the close of Francis Sherman’s “The House of Color” (see

Confederation Poets). And the recurrence of the crow as image (perhaps as spectre) changes our

reading of Sherman’s poem. Are both poets doing something similar with this image?

Strategies for Teachers

Strategy 1: The Confessional Urge (Various Poems)

Following an introduction to “confessional humanism,” ask students to consider the similarities

and differences between the confessional voice in poetry such as Brewster’s and the confessional

style of many YouTube channels, blogs, songs, etc. The latter are sometimes accused of being

narcissistic; is this fair? (You might choose to read/show an article or video making this

argument, for student response). Why do people have the urge to share “private” thoughts and

experiences with an unknown audience? What are the potential benefits for the creator and the

reader/viewer?

Ask students to find an example of a current confessional author or personality – and to compare

the medium and style of self-presentation with that of Brewster.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Articulate and justify points of view about texts and text elements

Speaking and Listening: Listen critically to analyse and evaluate concepts, ideas, and

information

Strategy 2: Visualization (“The Young Girl Waits for Love”)

Ask students to close their eyes and visualize while this poem is read aloud. What did they

visualize, and what were the quality/tone of the images? For example, were the mental images

solid or fluid? Brightly coloured or muted? If their imagination were to be represented in another

medium, which would be most appropriate: high definition video, watercolour painting, comic

book graphic, etc. This might work well as a paired activity, with students using active listening

techniques to understand their partner’s visualization and rationale, before sharing with the class.

Alternatively, students could be asked to represent this poem artistically.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Examine how textual features help a reader and viewer to create meaning

of the texts

Speaking and Listening: Consistently demonstrate active listening and concern for the needs,

rights, and feelings of others

Strategy 3: Situate the Speaker (“Where I Come From”)

Have students read this poem without any information about the author. Ask them to guess

where the speaker comes from, perhaps in terms of time as well as place. Did they recognize the

location as New Brunswick? Discuss why or why not, using evidence from the poem to explain

their thought process.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Articulate their own processes and strategies in exploring, interpreting,

and reflecting on sophisticated texts and tasks

Strategy 4: Where I Come From . . . (“Where I Come From”)

Challenge students to create their own verse, beginning with the line “Where I come from,

people . . .” Depending on the class temperament, these verses could remain private, or be

voluntarily shared with the group. Even if these remain private, students can discuss the

experience: When they write about where they come from, do they consider their past selves or

present selves? Their household, social circle, town, province, or country? Which was harder:

thinking of what defines their home, or expressing those thoughts in verse?

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Writing and Representing: Use writing and other ways of representing to explore, extend, and

reflect on the basis for their feelings, values, and attitudes

Strategy 5: Debate the Title and Consider the Issue (“Reasons for Reason”)

Challenge students to formally or informally debate the speaker’s main reason for reason, using

evidence from the poem. Students might develop their own positions, or represent one of two

sides. For example: 1) The speaker is afraid of being or becoming insane; or 2) The speaker is

afraid of the societal response to insanity (institutionalization).

This activity could involve, or could alternately be replaced by, a research activity. Students

could be asked to explore societal attitudes towards mental health in the era the poem was

written, as compared to today. What has changed in our understanding/diagnosis/treatment of

mental illness, and what has remained the same? After, ask students to consider whether

Brewster’s poem represents a contemporary or an old-fashioned take on mental health.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Speaking and Listening: Adapt language and delivery for a variety of audiences and purposes in

informal and formal contexts, some of which are characterized by complexity of purpose,

procedure, and subject matter

Reading and Viewing: Access, select, and research, in systematic ways, specific information to

meet personal and learning needs

Strategy 6: Compare to Sylvia Plath (“In Favour of Being Alive”)

Brewster mentions Sylvia Plath directly in this poem, a fellow confessional poet. “In Favour of

Being Alive” addresses similar themes to Plath’s earlier “Lady Lazarus.” Ask students to read

these poems together, discussing how “In Favour” could be considered a response to “Lazarus.”

What are the tonal and stylistic similarities? And how is Brewster’s voice distinct? (For example,

students might be prompted to evaluate the simplicity/grandiosity of the imagery in each poem,

and consider which technique they find more personally affecting).

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Note the relationship of specific elements of a particular text to elements

of other texts

Strategy 7: Compare to Elizabeth Bishop (“Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods”)

The well-known modern poet Elizabeth Bishop spend many of her formative years in Nova

Scotia, recalling that time and the Maritime landscape in her mature work. One of her poems,

“The Moose,” bears similarities to Brewster’s “Woman on a Bus” in that both works use the

New Brunswick landscape as a backdrop against which more profound observations are made. A

comparison of the poems would enable students to see how landscape is used as a point of entry

into other speculations.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Reading and Viewing: Note the relationship of specific elements of a particular text to elements

of other texts

Strategy 8: Ed’s Story (“Woman on a Bus: In New Brunswick Woods”)

Ask students to retell this story from Ed’s perspective, selecting their own form of writing or

representing (for example, journal entry, poem, or storyboard). Students could be encouraged to

discuss their choices of form, style, and content, and compare their imagined character with that

of other students. Is their Ed empathetic to his wife’s experience? Oblivious? How is this

conveyed in their work?

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Writing and Representing: Make effective choices of language and techniques to enhance the

impact of imaginative writing and other ways of representing

Writing and Representing: Evaluate the responses of others to their writing and media

productions

Further Reading

Brewster, Elizabeth. Passage of Summer: Selected Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969.

---. Selected Poems of Elizabeth Brewster: 1944-77. Ed. and Intro. Tom Marshall. Ottawa:

Oberon, 1985.

Gibbs, Robert. “Next Time From a Different Country.” Canadian Literature 62 (1974): 17-32.

Lockhart, Robert. “The Elizabeth Brewster Story.” The New Brunswick Reader 22 April 1995.

Pacey, Desmond. “The Poetry of Elizabeth Brewster.” Ariel (July 1973): 58-69.

For much more detailed primary and secondary source bibliographies of Brewster, see The New

Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia at http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/b/brewster_elizabeth.html

Copyright

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Paul Denham, Elizabeth Brewster’s literary

executor, for allowing us to use the poems above for this curriculum. Further use or distribution

of these poems, however, is a violation of Canadian copyright law and is strictly prohibited.

Under no circumstance may literary material used in the curriculum be reproduced, distributed,

or stored without the permission of the copyright holder.

All poems above, with the exception of “The Young Girl Waits for Love,” appear in Selected

Poems of Elizabeth Brewster: 1944-77. Ed. and Intro. Tom Marshall. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985.

“The Young Girl Waits for Love” appears in Brewster’s The Way Home. Ottawa: Oberon, 1982.

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All contents except for poetry and fiction copyright © Tony Tremblay, James W. Johnson, and

Alexandra Cogswell.