Reading The Visitants, I was struck by the absence of something I couldn't exactly place: some quality, some attitude that these 40 poems simply didn't contain. Anger? Sorrow? Bitterness? No, because in a few public lyrics, a few civil elegies, Miriam Waddington does express these dark emotions. What was it, this absence? It took me a while to realize that I was missing all sense of fear, and that The Visitants is a fearless book. Its main preoccupations are death, old age, and solitude—all of which are usually tackled with regret, unease, or the kind of boisterous swagger that seems a poor disguise for fear. But Waddington is undaunted at the prospect of death, and unafraid of direct feeling. She can, in consequence, write with warmth about the cold.

The rich texture of her language arises partly from another sort of courage. When the mood and the occasion are right, she's happy to use simple rhymes and verse-forms that more "so-phisticated" poets might scorn…. Waddington is particularly adept at using internal rhymes to knit the various elements of a poem together. Embedded in a poem called "When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot for a Change" are the phrases "old bread," "spidery red," and "unleavened as lead"—but the natural linkword, the underlying rhyme of dead, is never uttered. She often directs her energies to the nurture of a simple lyricism that will be able, if necessary, to carry complex emotions. In the 40 years that she has been writing poetry. Waddington's vision of life has probably changed less than the means by which she expresses it.

Perhaps the title poem of the new book is as close as she gets to personal despair. It describes things that have been lost, things that are no more: friends, her father, Gabriel Dumont, ancient stories, and so on. Unusually, she uses the term "emptiness," and the dead friends who come to her are "anguished." But these visitants bring with them gifts of music and light…. Not only the images but the very rhythms suggest acceptance, even delight. Her words flow like galvanized honey. Two of the poems in this collection, "Crazy Times" and "Prairie" …, use not a single word of more than two syllables. If you think that's easy, try it!

Most of her work is written in long meandering sentences—a delta of words, giving her images and thoughts enough time to develop through time. Waddington has never been a poet of broken, isolated fragments of ideas. In some of her poems a sweet sense of narrative underlies the lyric form, keeping us in touch with an oral, story-telling tradition. When you scan the lines with your eyes, and neglect to listen for the sound of her words, you miss at least half the effect. She is essentially a poet who connects: Canada with the Eastern Europe of her Jewish forebears, the Prairies with Toronto and Montreal, our lives with other generations, and our language with the speech of the dead.

This suggests one reason why her longer-than-usual poem "Real Estate" comes as such a surprise: for here the connections are snapped, and the twining familiar voice is broken constantly by brutal injunctions from another mouth: WE COULDN'T CARE LESS, SO LET THEM EAT GRASS, HURRY UP TIME IS MONEY, and so on. To this second voice everything is material, and everything is profane. Waddington's own vision takes things from this world (late flowers, lost languages, even the hard-working earthworms) and makes them into a sacrament. Her poems teem with things that are somehow ordinary, sacred, doomed, and eternal…. The words sing, the world gleams. The danger is easy lushness, a vice to which she occasionally, but only occasionally, succumbs. (p. 21)