Poetry
Day and Night
Dorothy Livesay · 1944
Synopsis
Nine poems or sequences dated from 1934 to 1943. In the one that gives the book its title, the dawn whistle sets the factory shift in motion; the men, a human belt, advance and fall back to the rhythm of the machines, then the voice turns to the singing of a spiritual before the furnaces. The Outrider follows a farm boy who has left for the city during the Depression and goes to work in the slaughterhouse while leaflets circulate. An elegy salutes Lorca, shot by the Francoists; West Coast tells of the Vancouver shipyards in wartime.
Context
The collection appeared in Toronto from Ryerson in March 1944, dedicated to Alan and Jean Crawley, with whom the author had founded the magazine Contemporary Verse in 1941. It gathers the poems of ten years; she said that her first poems of the thirties were all in it. She had discovered imagism when young, which in her view had set her on her way, through poets who were friends of her mother, Louise Morey Bowman and W. W. E. Ross.
Who it is for
A short collection, in a direct language, in which the rhythm of machines and of song counts as much as the image.
Prizes and reception
Governor General's Award for poetry for 1944, the first of the two won by its author, whom this book made known.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.