The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther (review)

How to tell the story of a poet murdered in her prime, a poet preeminently famous for having been murdered? "To Pat Lowther," Christine Wiesenthal writes, "goes the dubious if not fatal, distinction of having accrued the most sensationally tragic of contemporary literary reputations" (3). Identifying the slow and painful trajectory of Lowther's life as a poet, and acknowledging the "afterlife" of attention to her life and work, Wiesenthal concedes that "[o]ur collective memory of both her life and her work has not yet fully recovered from the violent fact of her murder" (9). We read her poetry through the prism of her murder. We read her life as half-lived. Wiesenthal, accordingly begins by examining the Lowther legacy, studying issues of memory and the ways in which memory interferes with representation. Only when she has cleared the decks, so to speak, of the debris that follows catastrophe, does Wiesenthal introduce the more conventional biographical elements of family, childhood on Vancouver's North Shore, first marriage, motherhood, and the initial enlargement of Lowther's world with her second marriage to the husband she so rapidly outstripped as poet and self-taught intellectual. With explicit reference to the biographer's role, Wiesenthal takes Lowther herself as guide. She is worth quoting at length on this point because she is so clear about her particular choices for this biography:

Lowther's own, eventually acute, sense of her life as a formation fissured like a "split rock" or "cleft mountain" is the idea that structures my approach to it. … Rather than one continuous "luminous and whole" biography—the life, or even a life of Pat Lowther—these narratives are offered instead as a series of overlapping, partially recursive biographical histories, coextensive and enfolded time-lines, each of which examines different (but interrelated) aspects of her life and work. Several half-lives, they seek to read Lowther within and across multiple interpretive frames that accord close attention to her still under-read poetry and its historical contexts. Readers wishing a direct through line on a given subject or work may consult the chronology and the index.

(15–16)

Wiesenthal's sophisticated foregrounding of the biographer's interpretive stance addresses practical matters and then situates members of Lowther's family and her friends and fellow poets in this web of memory and interpretation, ensuring an attentive and respectful exploration of this troubled life and its creativity.

Wiesenthal's weaving is also attentive to the world of poetry and of Lowther's own literary values. Lowther's murder on 23 September 1975 follows two years to the day the death of her hero, Pablo Neruda. Like him, Lowther was a leftist, and activist, and believed in the poet as part of the social and political world of her time. Roy Lowther's rage and jealousy were aroused by his wife's poetry, and her emerging success as a poet, more evidently than by her lovers. In a surely extraordinary move, his trial for her murder included the politics of the poetry scene at the time and almost included a poem that he had written some time earlier, entitled "September 23," which could have suggested his premeditation of the murder. Wiesenthal handles these dramatic scriptings with a deft hand but is also careful to read the beginning of Lowther's "legacy" quite critically into the earliest reactions to her murder, the reactions of her fellow poets, the eulogizing and the heroising, the laments that are deeply personal because they so often express the felt vulnerability of the poet friend. These are early constructions that Wiesenthal acknowledges as part of the baggage she inherits. For her own work, she is concerned with Lowther as poet, Lowther as a high-school dropout and welfare mother who found her voice through mythology, science, and anthropology as well as on the streets of Vancouver or the bluffs of Mayne Island. She situates Lowther in the poetic community of 1960s and 1970s Canada, noting in particular her importance as...