The Dowager Empress

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Adele Wiseman, lifelong writing friend of Margaret Laurence, is best know for her novels, The Sacrifice, winner of the Governor-General’s Award in 1956, and Crackpot, Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Award in 1974. She also wrote essays, plays, and children’s books. Her poetry, the work of the last ten years of her life, and mostly unpublished, ranges in form from haiku to sonnets to subversive feminist epic; in content from poems about poetry (“Instructions for Poems in Progress”), to love poems (“In Our Play”), to nature poems (“Mysteries of Flight”), to family poems, and to political poems, including “The Dowager Empress Suite.” This is Adele Wiseman writing in her most personal voice. The Dowager Empress: Selected Poems by Adele Wiseman rounds out our knowledge of a major Canadian writer.

AUTHOR

Elizabeth Greene

Elizabeth Greene’s first collection of poems, The Iron Shoes, was published by Hidden Brook in 2007. Her work has appeared in the Queen’s Feminist Review, and FreeFall and has been anthologized in Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Viet Nam War Era (2008) and in Arms Like Ladders: The Eloquent She (2007) as well as in two anthologies she has edited: Kingston Poets’ Gallery (2006) and Common Magic: The Book of the New (edited with Danielle Gugler) (2008). She edited (and contributed to) We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman (1997) which won the Betty and Morris Aaron Jewish Book Award Prize for Best Scholarship on a Canadian Subject (1998). Her fiction has appeared in Descant, Room of One’s Own and Quarry, as well as in the anthologies Vital Signs and Written in Stone. She taught English and creative writing courses at Queen’s University for many years. She is currently working on a memoir. A piece drawing on this material was published in Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood on the Dropped Threads 3 website. She lives in Kingston with her son Alan and three cats. She is the Ontario Representative for the League of Canadian Poets.

Reviews

“I found many delightful surprises in this collection by the late Adele Wiseman, most notably her pithy haikus and short poems. Wiseman was known primarily as a novelist, so who would have expected such a wide poetic range–from the acerbic “Mopping Up” to the gently lyrical “What is the Night?” Elizabeth Greene deserves kudos for bringing together this book of poetry by one of our major authors.”
–Kenneth Sherman

“Adele Wiseman, who was first and always a novelist, spent the final decade of her life writing poetry. Here, in this original selection of her poems, we hear a voice that extends our understanding of one of Canada’s most important writers of the twentieth century.”
–Ruth Panofsky, author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman

“Elizabeth Greene’s The Dowager Empress makes an important contribution to Canadian literature by introducing readers both here and abroad to Adele Wiseman’s powerful poetry. Wiseman was an important and talented Canadian writer who has been unjustly neglected – a phenomenon which Greene, in both this book and We Who Can Fly, seeks to rectify. The poems in The Dowager Empress are, like Wiseman’s prose, direct, passionate, and strong, and Greene, herself an accomplished poet, helpfully situates Wiseman’s poems in the context of her larger oeuvre and her life. The result–both for those of us who are already admirers of Wiseman and those who are new to her work–is illuminating and a delight.”
–Nora Gold, author of The Dead Man, Fields of Exile, and Marrow and Other Stories

“In “Mopping Up” Adele writes specifically about what she called “alternative voices.” It was something that she sincerely cared about, and, in 1989, when Indigenous literature was still in its infancy, and I had nothing more than a bundle of unpublished poems and a few big dreams, she invited me to The Banff Centre’s Writers’ Workshop. What immediately comes to mind was her mother-bear presence and generosity, and especially for the fledging writer a deep understanding of the human condition – as glimpsed in these poems.”
–Armand Garnet Ruffo, author of Treaty #