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Word craft and
fragility
Brian Bethune
Maclean's
April 29 2002
Nancy-Gay Rotstein would never describe herself as a reluctant poet,
"I've always written," she says, "because I have to." But for
someone who was first published when she was 12, she's never been in
a hurry to show off the results. "My grandmother, unknown to me,
took one of my poems and submitted it to Chatelaine magazine, which
ran it," Rotstein, 58, recalls with a smile. "My school principal
announced it over the intercom. It was awful." Even for her husband.
Max, a prominent Toronto banker, "didn't know he was married to a
poet until seven years after the wedding, when he found a poem I had
left lying around."
So it's hardly surprising that Rotstein's new book, This Horizon and
Beyond (McClelland & Stewart), a collection of her work from the
past 25 years, has a considerable number of previously unpublished
poems, new and old. Many were inspired by the stages of family life,
says Rotstein, the mother of three adult children. "Even as I wrote
the early ones, I thought to keep them back and eventually put them
out together."
 All her work is shot through with a historical consciousness that's
both Jewish and Canadian. There are references to Masada, the
Spanish Inquisition and the history of the Ottawa Valley. Alfred
Dreyfus makes an appearance in a modern cafe, "his eyes schooled in
sadness ... unseen among / the Sunday brunchers." That same
consciousness is also in the family cycle, where Rotstein's
children, even before birth, seem to be new beads strung along the
great chain of being: "I take you with me / as a heartbeat / tucked
inside my soul / into the backstreets / for you, will ask questions
/ the reason ghetto birthed." But there is also the present moment,
and in For Tracey, as she watches her youngest daughter sleep,
Rotstein evocatively captures the stab of terror of a child's
vulnerability can inspire: "how I wish rabbit and bunny sentinels /
could ever protect you from an / age that rapes childhood."
If there's a single theme that links a lifetime's work, it's just
that the impermanence of every human achievement, the fragility of
peace, order and good government. Maybe that's why Rotstein was
drawn to law school after her children were grown (though she has
never practised as a lawyer, working instead as a board of directors
member for the Canada Council, National Library and Telefilm
Canada). Law is society's means of keeping anarchy at bay, she says,
just as poetry is something permanent crafted from fleeting emotion
and imagery, another way of creating order out of chaos.
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