To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

infrequent. Dazzle, Roberts' second chapbook
(Ryerson, 1957) is published a full
thirty years after her first. Roberts is now
51—what has intervened? She has married,
raised two children. In Star and Stalk,
which follows shortly after (Emblem
Books, 1959), is only twelve pages long.
Twice to Flame (McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1961,
58 pp) and Extended (Fiddlehead Books,
1967, 44 pp), are Roberts' first substantial
books. Extended is dedicated to her husband,
A. R. Leisner; The Self of Loss is dedicated
to his memory.
Roberts continues to publish in the best
Canadian and American publications. Despite
her talent and achievements, she doesn't
qualify for her own listing in the 1973 edition
of the Oxford Companion to Canadian
History and Literature. (Her father, the
adventure writer and poet Theodore
Goodridge Roberts, has an extended listing
as, of course, do his brother, Charles G.D.
Roberts, and cousin, Bliss Carman.) But in
the supplement to this edition, Extended is
(somewhat faintly) praised for its concern
with landscape and for "placing specific
locales in larger terms in language sometimes
craggily dense, sometimes indirect,
but generally successful." Nor does Roberts
merit a separate listing in the 1983 edition
of the Oxford Companion. The brief entry is
more epitaph than commentary: Roberts
"showed promise in the fifties with Dazzle
(1957) and In Star and Stalk (1959), though
her later work has not become popular."
Reading Roberts' final book, In the Flight
of Stars (Goose Lane, 1991), it is difficult
not to feel that popularity is a deficient criterion
of the value of Roberts' remarkable
sensibility—a sensibility I can only
described as grace—her insight into the
human condition, her technical mastery of
prosody, syntax, and image. Not withstanding
the vicissitudes of literary appraisal, I
would that Dorothy Roberts could know
that her poetic achievement will stand.
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