Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old.

Ruth Panofsky is an award-winning poet who lives and writes in Toronto, where she teaches Canadian Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. She is the author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (2006) and The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture (2012). Her award-winning critical edition of the collected poetry of Miriam Waddington appeared in two volumes in 2014 and, most recently, she edited The Spice Box: Canadian Jewish Writing (2017). Her newest work, Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing, which focuses on key twentieth-century publishers, editors, and literary agents, was published in 2019. She is also an award-winning poet. She received the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007). Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, her third volume of verse, received a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award.

Ruth Panofsky's profile page

Miriam Waddington was a trailblazer. She was the first Jewish Canadian woman to publish poetry written in English and participated in the rise and flowering of modernist Canadian poetry. Her work was groundbreaking for its conversational tone, stylistic play and its focus on female lived experience.

Miriam Waddington's profile page

• Short-listed, Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature (Poetry)
• Winner, Rosa and the late David Finestone Canadian Jewish Studies Award for Best Book
• Winner, PROSE Award, Literature
• Winner, Canadian Jewish Literary Award, Yiddish Category
• Short-listed, Eric Hoffer Book Award

Panofsky comprehensively and cleanly presents Waddington’s poems and acts as a scholarly mediator who never intrudes upon the poems; Her collection makes readability and usability a priority. This collection does the necessary foundational work for this further scholarship by gathering a very rich body of material and opening the boundaries of genre, position, language, and media to open-ended inquiry. Here, Panofsky has accomplished the monumental task of collecting and evaluating the life’s work of a prolific writer and critic without ever reifying the collection as a monument; on the page, Waddington’s text remains varied, expansive, and alive. (http://www.thebullcalfreview.ca/miriamwaddington.htm)

Andrea Hasenbank