The Shadow-Maker

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Genres: Poetry

83 pages

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Gwendolyn MacEwen was one of Canada's most celebrated writers publishing several stories and many works of poetry throughout her career. She was born in Toronto, Ontario on September 1, 1941 to Elsie and Alick MacEwen. As a child she attended public schools in both Toronto and Winnipeg, and when she was seventeen her first poem was published in the Canadian Forum, a journal which published the works of both new and renowned writers. At the age of eighteen she left school to pursue a full time career as a writer and at the same time opened a Toronto coffee house, "The Trojan Horse".

As a child Gwendolyn didn't get the best care from her parents. Her mother was mentally unstable, spending most of her life in institutions and her father was largely an alcoholic. However this may have been what led to her writing being so heavily focused on mythology, dreams, magic, and history. After leaving school Gwendolyn taught herself several different languages including Greek, French, Arabic and Hebrew, which she used to translate many of her poems. Her fluency in several languages is what most likely encouraged her to make references to cultures outside of Canada. Gwendolyn tended to focus on more surreal ideas in her writing and she had her own unique way of expressing them when compared to other poets from her time. A lot of her poetry involved changing the surrealism into reality by using strong imagery and often allegory. The cultures she studied often showed up in her work as part of the overall imagery and allusions to historical events were quite common.

Her volume of poems "The Shadow-Maker" won the Governor General's Award in 1969 and included many poems such as her famous "Dark Pines Under Water". During the mid eighties she was a writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario and then later the University of Toronto. Gwendolyn died in 1987 at the age of 46 from what was believed to have been health problems due to alcohol. Although she was not alive to be present, later that year her collection "Afterworlds" was awarded the Governor General's Award, making it the second time her work had won such a prestigious honour.

Reviews

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m humbled at the realization that the works of Gwendolyn MacEwen, one of Canada’s finest poets had until now been completely unknown to me. She published over twenty books during her relatively short life and won the Governor General’s Award in 1969 for this volume of poetry. She taught herself to read Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and French and translated works of all those languages into English. Her work seems to have largely disappeared from public notice today, possibly because she died so tragically young, in 1987 at the age of 46.
There's a mythic quality to many of these poems — perhaps influenced by her study of Arabic works. MacEwen was no naturalist poet but she deftly captures the underlying character of the untamed Canadian landscape, the changelessness of a land that refuses to be "owned".
"When we took off over /the shallow waves next day
our pockets were full / of pebbles that we knew
we'd throw away,
and when we turned around / to see the island
one last time, it was lost / in fog and it
had never quite been found."
She is most appealing in episodes such as "Sky-Riders" where she conjures up other voices or tosses ideas back and forth between speakers.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, Gwendolyn MacEwan is to Canada is as Seamus Heaney is to Ireland, rooting around in the country's soil to find its darkness, its beauty, its myths, and shaping this into something that speaks of the contemporary land. MacEwan's poems are haunted by the power of nature and the smallness of humankind. There's something fundamentally Canadian in the strange spirituality of her poems. I love it.

She won the Governor General's Literary Award twice. Why are all her books out of print?

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite poets, this is her best collection. Amazing, amazing, amazing.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite poems, Dark Pines Underwater is in this collection. MacEwan has that hint of mythology in her poetry - that exploration of the lines between inner and outer being.