Bøger af Patience Wheatley

...I laid on my bed in realization that two thirds of the day had gone, and I had done nothing productive. My body wouldn't let me. My mind was everywhere attempting to embrace the fear I adapted over 20 years ago. What will I do now? My spirit was broken as I laid in a pit of deep hurt and frustration brought on by my inability to obey and my ability to love. How could he do this again? Better question is, how did I put myself in a position of demobilization again...I sighed...it's ok. Each sigh may not have been a relief, but a release of the ties that bind. I closed my eyes and I sighed a release of second fiddle. A release of settling. A release of the years of second guessing my womanhood. A release of confusion that God wasn't in. A release of co-dependency. Each sigh brought another painful stitch as the healing process took place, the mending of my heart. I sighed, and I released bottled tears that I thought dried up with the promise of No more tears. I cried & I moaned as I grieved the perfect death of my love. My soul ached as it ripped apart once mended souls and I blew the very life of him into the heavens to give to God all I couldn't handle. I closed my eyes to erase the memories, to envision a brighter day. Finally, I released a sigh of relief as I was surrounded by those who love me unconditionally.

In this her second book of poems, Patience Wheatley reflects upon her experience with the Canadian Women's Army Corps -- exploring her own coming-of-age and offering an historical testament to to the Canadian women who joined the Corps in World War II. The discipline of army drill "recalling crunching patterns / made by our feet on parade ground gravel / to sharp words of command" becomes in memory a time "when once we did it together and perfectly" -- an image of fulfillment both spiritual and sexual. A young girl's romanticism is later transformed, after marriage and children, to the "blessed revelation" that "love is / the predicate." Rich with sentiment, Wheatley's poems are never sentimental, but enlivened by honesty and wit.

A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley's first published collection of poetry, though her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Mamashee, Contemporary Verse II, Quarry, Origins, Grain, Northern Light and Event. She has also published a number of short stories, including the much-noted "Mr. Mackenzie King" in the anthology Fiddlehead Greens (;Oberon, 1979);. The forty-three poems of A Hinge of Spring are assured and confident in tone, and while their geographic locations are scattered there is little sense of the merely occasional. Wheatley's writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence in which literary associations and the response to immediate experience work together.