Read This: Types of Canadian Women, Volume II
Poetry by K.I. Press (Gaspereau Press)
REVIEW BY Nicholas Bradley
The first volume of Types of Canadian Women, a biographical dictionary, was published in 1903. K.I Press’s Volume II is not a sequel but an ironic response. Its prose, poems and occasional lyrics describe the private lives and secret desires of a cast of unnamed turn-of-the-century women. These women, according to social convention, are supposed to “do nothing” that they “could not do in public.”
But in Press’s imaginative and lively accounts, they have affairs, shoot cattle, perform abortions, are accused of witchcraft and commit various acts of what Press calls “heroine-ism.” The women are ordinary and surprising—at once types and individuals—and Press’s characterizations counteract the stiff formality seen in many of the archival photographs that accompany the poems.
Her subject matter and bone-dry sense of humour reveal a debt to Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, but these finely detailed depictions of Canadian women, “such a vague and willowy race,” are distinctively hers. Press hints at the complexities of inner lives with great economy, writing adeptly of struggle, sadness and sometimes happiness, with a fine ear and a conviction that these women haunt us.
