The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture by Anita Lahey (review)

In an interview included in The Mystery Shopping Cart, M. Travis Lane reflects on her “kind of feminism” and her resistance to the notion of “The Poet with a capital P,” who in her view is “a romantic figure, the poet as wise, as sexy, as little Laytons.” Anita Lahey’s engaging volume of essays and reviews is largely devoted to the shapes and subjects, and the romance and wisdom, of poetry written by women, although she suggests that her emphasis was not wholly deliberate: “My focus on women poets has not been intentional: I’m not that organized. … But it’s clearly the work of women I’ve most often been compelled to analyze, to mull in a broader context and to discuss publicly.” The result is a collection that underscores the diversity concealed by such a descriptor as “women’s writing.” “I think it was Roethke who made fun of women poets stamping their tiny feet at God,” Lane muses in her interview. “I was writing and publishing in the fifties and sixties and there was this awful feeling that: what could women write about? They had no experience.” It was indeed Theodore Roethke who enumerated feminine failings at the beginning of an essay on Louise Bogan, whose poetry derived instead, he thought, from “the severest lyrical tradition in English.” Roethke’s objection half a century ago to “caterwauling” has not aged well, but the poetic vigour and precision that he demanded are, as Lahey’s essays attest, perennial topics of critical debate.

Miscellaneous by design, The Mystery Shopping Cart is a compilation of reviews, interviews, and reminiscences. The occasional nature of the contents is evident, but unexpected connections emerge between the constituent parts. Lahey examines the poetry of Dorothy Roberts, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and P.K. Page, but most of her essays attend to the works of living authors. Particularly interesting are interviews with Lane and Alice Munro, one of the few writers of fiction to appear in the book. (Munro, consistently charming, is a source of bon mots: “I feel you could be almost crushed by happiness, lost in it. … I am the child of Presbyterians.”) Not all of Lahey’s subjects are eminences; a series of “Short Reviews and Notes from Arc Poetry Magazine” treats collections published by younger writers. A review of Robin Skelton’s Facing the Light falls outside Lahey’s usual range, as she notes. Her conversation with Stephanie Bolster and John Barton about poetry and painting is rich with insights. The four “personal essays” that conclude the book concern travels in Poland, the death of a friend, eulogies, and the author’s father, who sold and repaired cash registers. The link between Century Cash and MacEwen and Munro is not obvious, but Lahey proposes an analogy between her vocation and his: “I work for print publications that are beginning to seem as clunky and quaint as old cash registers. It comes to seem reckless.”

Reviews in literary journals fade from sight so quickly that their reappearance in books is always welcome. That Lahey’s assessments are generous and conscientious makes The Mystery Shopping Cart doubly gratifying. In the small world of Canadian letters, reviews are often heated and sometimes given to pettiness. Lahey’s reviews are not uniformly enthusiastic, and her criticism can be pointed, but her writing is even-handed. I happen to have read several of the reviews in question when they were first published. I found them no less provocative the second time around, but I especially enjoyed Lahey’s commentary on her critical strengths and flaws: the reviews are followed by brief, strict reflections. She notes, for instance, her impatience with Susan Glickman’s Running in Prospect Cemetery: “I was thirty-two, old enough to be judicious, thoughtful and fair. Did I misread Glickman? Am I simply not her ideal reader – do we have a sensibility disconnect?” Critics of course can pretend to singularly discerning vision, but few can unfailingly distinguish dross from gold...