Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women's Poetry by Diana M.A. Relke (review)

HUMANITIES 285 Remarkably, political accomplishment accompanied personal anguish. Despite emotional instability, Scott=s public legacy is one of restraint in policy, accommodation and consultation with the public, and a civic expansiveness manifested in sound institutions and magnificent public buildings such as the legislative building in Regina, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and a series of imposing courthouses and other facilities across the southern half of the province. Barnard says these buildings >reflected the attitudes of the people and helped shape attitudes and beliefs of the generations to come.= However, there is more portent than revelation in the comment, since he offers no evidence to support this causal connection. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing proposition, if only because the interposition of the public and private spheres is a continuing theme of Saskatchewan history. For the last halfcentury , the province=s politics have oscillated between the two spheres, as represented on the one hand by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor the New Democratic Party (NDP) and on the other by the Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and Saskatchewan parties. The distinctive feature of Scott=s tenure in office was his capacity to harness these rival forces. The Liberal parties of the adjacent prairie provinces proved less adroit, succumbing to the pressure of the organized farmers on several fronts, not least the electoral. The triumph of the CCF in 1944 marked the triumph of the public over the private and signalled a realignment in provincial politics. Since then, in 1964 and 1982 (and in all likelihood in the first election of the new century), the defeat of the NDP has been followed by a reassertion of the private over the public. This lurching from left to right and back again was foreign to Scott and his immediate successors as premiers of Saskatchewan. The reason for that difference remains underexplained in this biography, perhaps necessarily so since the answer lies in the complex simplicities of federalism, the national party structure, a one-crop economy, an immense immigrant population, and a culture of rapid development that depended for support upon government by whoever led. Scott=s is a complex personality, and it is no great criticism of this book to say that the source of his strengths and weakness remain a mystery at its end. How did a man, himself so emotionally insecure, win the loyalty of colleagues and public? How did he, a man Barnhart says knew no personal peace, instil a political culture of moderation and administrative stability? (DAVID E. SMITH) Diana M.A. Relke. Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women=s Poetry University of Calgary Press 1999. 364 $24.95. In the preface to her >Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women=s Poetry,= Diana M.A. Relke suggests that >Canadian ecological literary criticism came HUMANITIES 287 Essays in Western Women=s History University of British Columbia Press. xii, 360. $85.00, $29.95 There should be more books like this. Telling Tales investigates how people as individuals and in groups shaped and reshaped the political, cultural, economic, and social development of western Canada. The authors use archives, discourse, and oral testimony to examine the dynamics of everyday life among the women in the four western provinces, and the editors, Catherine Cavanaugh and Randi Warne, place the contributions in a concise historiographical perspective. The authors interpret daily life to include religion and racial and ethnic stereotyping as well as the over-arching paradigms of differing cultural expectations of gender, reproductive strategies, and paid and unpaid work. They show how women=s assumptions and past behaviour were tested in the crucible of a vast, newly colonized region that offered both abundance and serious hardship during the first half of the twentieth century. Women differed in their responses to the challenges of western living and one of the strengths of this collection is its delineation of the way race and class together with other variables such as religion, age, and place of residence could result in differing viewpoints among women. The authors illustrate the practicalities of imperialism at the local level, and situate the individual case studies within the literature on the ebb and flow of the British Empire. Of the major...