I think most of Miriam Waddington's poems in her recent collection of new and selected poems, Driving Home, are boring. But as this collection spans thirty years of work, boredom here is perhaps not entirely her fault: the worst poems reflect the fashions of times they were written in. It is difficult not to be bored with intricate little home-made myths and texts designed to fill up with sentiment the empty prairies or an empty life. And it is difficult now not to be bored with the careful encapsulating into rhyme of the passions and anguish of a social worker in the 40's and 50's, and of the lives of those she was in contact with.

But I wonder if Waddington doesn't share these views. The best of the poems in Driving Home are mostly in the section of new poems (since 1969). Here she is able sometimes to get inside her present life and show it to the reader in a convincing way. (p. 85)

Some hint of the powerful poems Waddington might have written out of her social work in clinics, jails and as a welfare official can be seen in "Investigator" (1942) where she captures for a moment something of the inside of the homes and lives of the poor…. But too often the emotion is lost in the prison of rhyme…. This poem clunks along to the stunning insight of:

          I haven't heard much that was new to me
          or brought any word that was new to you;
          it seems our separate selves must curve
          wide from the central pulsing nerve
          which ought to unite us, you and me…

Waddington's poems such as this one fail to let any particular emotion break out, to transcend the confines of rhyme in any way so that the poem is more than reporting in verse. Or maybe there was no further emotion? (p. 86)

My lack of complete belief in what Waddington is saying appears even in the new poems of this collection. Something is missing, for me, in a poem like "Transformations" when she says she wants to spend her life in Gimli listening to the silence…. Similarly, in "Dead lakes":

                 I look down
                 in the dead waters
                 of Sudbury and
                 I think of Flaubert …

I lose the poem entirely when leaps like this are too large for me. Something else must be going on in the poet's mind, I keep thinking, to make these images mean more to her than she has conveyed to me. (pp. 87-8)

And disconnectedness appears in more of the early poems. In some sort of try to give Canada a veneer of European mythical and traditional history, Waddington has lines like (from "Lullaby" (1945)):

                 and night's sweet gypsy now
                 fiddles you to sleep
                 far from snows of winnipeg
                 and seven sisters lakes.

Images of gypsies, or Elizabethan rhetoric in poems like "Thou didst say me" (1945), "Sea bells" (1964) or "The mile runner" (1958), appear slightly incongruous in the Canadian reality, to say the least—like the pseudo-gothic Houses of Parliament rising over the sawmills of Hull.

Just how Waddington herself fits into the Canadian reality is the question dealt with in some of the better poems of this collection. In "Fortunes" (1960), Waddington considers how luck and chance finally don't alter her own specific historical being:

        I went out into the autumn night
        to cry my anger to the stone-blind fields
        just as I was, untraditional, North American
        Jewish, Russian, and rootless in all four,
        religious, unaffiliated, and held
        in a larger-than-life seize of hate.

In a poem about her travels (1966) she describes how around the world she finds both beautiful things and hatred of Jews. Her response here is to suddenly feel that there is nowhere she can be at home. But in "Driving Home" (1968) she seems to find home where she is, under the huge signs of the corporations…. (p. 88)

The finest of the older poems in Driving Home to me are the poems about love. In "Interval" (1943) Waddington shows a man who has idealized women being forced at last to recognize their humanity…. There are also poems that speak of the men that fail her, however: the poignant "Remembering you" (1965):

              When you kissed you
              kissed like a young man
              filled with greeting and gaiety;
 
              when you loved you
              loved like an old man
              filled with slowness and ceremony;
 
              when you left you
              left like a man of no age
              filled with fear that ceremony
 
              had given me something
              to keep more lasting than ritual
              richer and brighter than darkness.

Despite such betrayals, Waddington can celebrate another relationship in "The lonely love of middle age" (1966). And in "Icons" (1969), she says she carries with her the idea and memory of love, to hold out against the darkness of her age and our age. (pp. 88-9)

Celebrations like this of the dilemmas of Waddington's recent existence seem to me the best and most interesting work she has ever done. These poems speak more directly and openly of her predicament than her earlier work does, and thus the recent poems give me the impression of greater accuracy I like Waddington's work of the last seven years or so so much better than her previous poems that I find it difficult in my mind not to think of her as a new talent: emerging strong and mature in middle age with a lot to say about that time of life in her social position in modern Canada. (p. 89)