Di Brandt

Diana Brandt

Questions I Asked My Mother

A collection of poetry, in which the author voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in.

Now You Care

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions - Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee - and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women. The results broaden, enrich, and finally recover the motherstory in ways that have revolutionary implications for our institutions and imaginations.

Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature

Wild Mother Dancing

Annie Jacobsen

Jane Finlay-Young

This is the story of Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, who comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor's family in Kitchener, Ontario, during the Depression. Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic wife, Cammy, an alcoholic, and their two demanding but affectionate children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences such as running water, wringer washing machines, and Hoovers. She wears expensive clothes cast off by Cammy and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. Her world explodes open in her new surroundings, and when Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person. While caring for her own family, Lexi finds a diary written by her older brother during the family's journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one that reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Kitchener, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realisation that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny. "Watermelon Syrup" is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities.

A Novel

Watermelon Syrup

Barbara Godard

Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry announces a bold revision of the genealogy of Canadian literary modernism by foregrounding the originary and exemplary contribution of women poets, critics, cultural activists, and experimental prose writers Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Phyllis Webb, Elizabeth Brewster, Jay Macpherson, Anne Wilkinson, Anne Marriott, and Elizabeth Smart. In the introduction, editor Di Brandt champions particularly the achievements of Livesay, Page, and Webb in setting the visionary parameters of Canadian and international literary modernism. The writers profiled in Wider Boundaries of Daring are the real founders of Canadian modernism, the contributors of this volume argue, both for their innovative aesthetic and literary experiments and for their extensive cultural activism. They founded literary magazines and writers’ groups, wrote newspaper columns, and created a new forum for intellectual debate on public radio. At the same time, they led busy lives as wives and mothers, social workers and teachers, editors and critics, and competed successfully with their male contemporaries in the public arena in an era when women were not generally encouraged to hold professional positions or pursue public careers. The acknowledgement of these writers’ formidable contribution to the development of modernism in Canada, and along with it “wider boundaries of daring” for women and other people previously disadvantaged by racial, ethnic, or religious identifications, has profound implications for the way we read and understand Canadian literary and cultural history and for the shape of both national and international modernisms.

The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry

Wider Boundaries of Daring

Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor’s family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Depression. Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy’s expensive cast off clothes, and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. When Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person. At home, Lexi finds a journal written by her older brother during the family’s journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one hat reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Waterloo, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realization that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny. Watermelon Syrup is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities.

Brandt travels to Jerusalem to visit a friend and to witness the intifada of occupied Palestine."The good writers offer something new--new to them and new to you. Here Di Brandt collects three long poems that bring honour to our culture. The title sequence is a marvellous achievement. It is a love story filled with hope, yearning, beauty and sadness. I have never seen Palestine so clear."--George Bowering

Di Brandt

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