A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley’s first published collection of poetry, though her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Mamashee, Contemporary Verse II, Quarry, Origins, Grain, Northern Light and Event. She has also published a number of short stories, including the much-noted “Mr. Mackenzie King” in the anthology Fiddlehead Greens (Oberon, 1979). The forty-three poems of A Hinge of Spring are assured and confident in tone, and while their geographic locations are scattered there is little sense of the merely occasional. Wheatley’s writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence in which literary associations and the response to immediate experience work together.