To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Opinions &L Notes
and pioneer, longtime resident and passer-by.
"However anachronistic I maybe," he writes,
"I am a product of the American earth, and
in nothing quite so much as in the contrast
between what I knew through the pores and
what I was officially taught" (23). As the emphatic
"American" here indicates, once away
from Canada, Stegner identified with the
United States and its literature yet, equally,
this statement includes the generic form—
he never forgot that he qualified, as he wrote,
as a "halfway" Canadian since he "missed
becoming a Canadian by only about one
inch of rain" (WW 277, Provincial 299).
That personal story, and that broader allegiance,
is everywhere affirmed in Wolf
Willow, which shows its author to have
been a rare being indeed, a most Canadian
American writer. Personal circumstance
allowed Stegner to grow up a prairie boy on
what he calls last plains frontier, "With
nothing in sight to stop anything, along a
border so unwatched that it might have
been unmapped..." (283). He was one of
those very few who could write, quite
truthfully, that "The 49th parallel ran
directly through my childhood, dividing
me in two" (81). Ever beckoned back to
Whitemud by the scent of wolf willow and
the pull of memory, his connection to
Canada was far more than halfway.
Profoundly—if not literally—Wallace
Stegner was "native" to this country.
WORKS CITED
Stegner, Wallace. "Coda: Wilderness
Letter." i960. Rpt. The Sound of
Mountain Water. 1967. Lincoln: U
Nebraska P, 1985.
. "The Provincial Consciousness."
University of Toronto Quarterly 45
(1974): 299-310.
. Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a
Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.
1962. New York: Viking, 1966.
Dorothy Roberts
1906-1993
Rhea Tregebov
I in my age am sent
the poems of the dead
who are melted down to themselves
who lie in the thin wafers
who are holy and consumed for love
who are back in their time
who are in their native land
or journeying to return
(from "The Poets of Home,"
In the Flight of Stars)
"Small views of my life would be of the
constrictions first"—so Dorothy Roberts
begins "Some Phases," the autobiographical
Foreword to The Self of Loss: New and
Selected Poems (Fiddlehead, 1976) which
provides a rare, if oblique, insight into this
extraordinary New Brunswick poet's life.
Constrictions indeed. An expatriate who
never was reconciled to exile, and a poet
whose great gifts were in large part ignored
by her compatriots, Roberts nonetheless
succeeded in producing in her long life a
body of literary work of striking lucidity
and intelligence. It is, however, painful to
follow, through the bibliographical compendiums
and periodical indices, the
vagaries of Roberts' career. In the flares and
then embers of critical appreciation thus
observed, it is tempting to see Roberts' life
as paradigmatic of Canadian poets of that
era (women in particular), and of the
impediments they faced.
Initially, Roberts' talent and promise do
receive attention. A chapbook of poems, Songs
for Swift Feet (Ryerson, 1927), is published
when the young poet is all of 21. Her work
appears in anthologies such as Our Canadian
Literature, edited by Bliss Carman, as early
as 1935. While there are frequent contributions
to anthologies through the '50s and
'6os, book publication is both sparse and
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