Working for decades in English and French in poetry, novels, and translations that investigate the relationship between language and female subjectivity, Lola Lemire Tostevin has hewn her own unique and intensely aesthetic path across the national literary landscape, earning her the reputation as one of Canada’s leading feminist writers.

Tostevin’s latest offering of poetry emerges from her deep-seated interest in the creativity of women who face advanced age and its ­ailments. Through study of exhibitions in galleries and museums, films and dance performances, and voluminous “bodies” of text, it became clear to Tostevin that aging not only serves women’s creativity but also reinforces it, revealing many forms of strength in vulnerability.
Singed Wings invites the reader to peer into the interior world of Camille Claudel, whose intimate understanding of her subjects, from young girl to old woman, captured quite a different power than that of her lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. Although Claudel was not able to fully realize her creative process into old age, many others did, including Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Betty Goodwin, Pina Bausch, and Agnès Varda, and it is in direct response to the vital creativity of these women that the poet finds the inspiration and determination to move her own art forward.

Spurred on by these groundbreaking precedents that displace the narcissistic, “shopworn” notion of the ideal woman described only in terms of desired female form, Tostevin allocates space where a writer ­facing her own aging process can use the experience to give it new shapes in language, positing that reimagining the various creative forms of women into language is a postmodern undertaking in an ­artistic milieu where postmodernism may turn out to have as many heads as the mythical Hydra.

Lola Lemire Tostevin is a bilingual Canadian writer who works mainly in English. She is the author of three novels, eight collections of poetry, numerous pieces of short fiction, and a collection of literary essays and criticism. She has translated into English the work of many writers, including Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Paule Thévenin, and she has translated into French Michael Ondaatje’s Elimination Dance. Her novel Frog Moon was translated into French and two of her collections of poetry, Color of Her Speech and ’sophie, were translated into Italian. Her most recent novel, The Other Sister, was published in the fall of 2008.Tostevin has taught creative writing at York University, Toronto, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, London. She is presently preparing a second collection of literary essays and is working on a series of short fictions.

Lola Lemire Tostevin's profile page

Slow Down and Listen: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Singed Wings

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH, 2014

Lola Lemire Tostevin. Singed Wings. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013

~Reviewed by Rob McLennan

Given that nearly a decade has passed since the appearance of her previous trade poetry collection, Site-Specific Poems (2004), there is much to celebrate for the fact that Toronto writer Lola Lemire Tostevin has released Singed Wings. Not that she was idle during that period—much of the past decade and a half of Tostevin’s writing career has equally focused on fiction, with the publication of her most recent novels being The Jasmine Man (2001) and The other sister (2008). For those who admire her poetry, you’ll find that Singed Wings maintains her structures of the sequence-fragment; the book’s composed of six extended meditations on art and life that wrap around and through fragments that accumulate into something very much in the compositional unit of the book-length poem. Fluently bilingual, and working also as a translator of literary works between French and English, Tostevin’s poetry has always felt to me closer to French writing traditions than English ones, exploring a lyrical abstract that requires a particular slowness—very much pushing to slow the reader down so that we can listen. One could say, also, that her poetry as a whole exists as a series of responses—this collection includes sections that respond to works by Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois, Betty Goodwin, and Frieda Kahlo. As she writes in her acknowledgements to Singed Wings:

For the last few years, I have explored the creativity of women who practiced their art either under unfavourable social or physical circumstances, such as Camille Claudel and Frieda Kahlo, or into advanced age, such as Louise Bourgeois and Betty Goodwin. I have travelled to several cities to attend Pina Bausch’s dance troupe and choreography as I have for Marie Chouinard. I never miss a novel, a film, a play, an interview, or biography featuring Marguerite Duras, or a book by or a biography of Hannah Arendt, or the films of Agnès Varda. My writing practice is modest compared to these women’s art yet they nudge me to keep on. With each additional year, I grow more grateful.

Over the years, many poets have responded to artwork, including Diana Brebner and Stephanie Bolster, as well as American poet Robert Creeley. But Tostevin’s responses seem more in keeping with Phil Hall’s “An Oak Hunch: Essay on Purdy,” moving very much in the poetry-as-response as opposed to any kind of descriptive lyric. Composed in six poem/sections, Tostevin’s poem-fragments exist as a kind of sketchbook, responding quickly and with incredible clarity, even in the midst of sharp and sudden turns. The second section, “XIVPHILLIPICS,” subtitled “After Cicero,” writes through and responds to the writings of Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, while also working through the subject of aging, specifically the subject of how an aging woman is seen and treated (not necessarily favourably, as one might imagine). As she writes:

Are the years less disagreeable now
Than they will be, say, in her ninetieth?

How did age steal womanhood faster
Than womanhood stole her children?

I, for one, am very pleased about Tostevin’s return to poetry. Just how soon is too soon to ask for more?

“all the poems in Singed Wings offer complex metaphysical chats … casts a cold, hard, and very honest eye on aging …”
—Canadian Literature

“Lola Lemire Tostevin is an incisive, intelligent, and sharply observant writer.”
—Quarry

“Love, nape-tingling work.”
—Books in Canada