Miriam Waddington's memories of childhood embrace adventurous rambles across the prairie in an early Ford, jokes and folk songs around the dinner table, and growing in a family of enthusiastic gardeners. Happiness dominates despite her sense of being...

When Miriam Waddington writes of the exhaustion of language, that inevitable subject for poets, she speaks first of the lost language of nature…. But for Waddington the sense of a lost language is only momentary. She turns again and again to writing of the ineffable wind, and of whatever grows, in a language "light / and quick" through which she makes it possible, in the words of another poem, for "trees [to] yield up their wordless therapy." Waddington declared this direc...

I think most of Miriam Waddington's poems in her recent collection of new and selected poems, Driving Home, are boring. But as this collection spans thirty years of work, boredom here is perhaps not entirely her fault: the worst poems reflect the fashions of times they were written in. It is difficult not to be bored with intricate little home-made myths and texts designed to fill up with sentiment the empty prairies or an empty life. And it is difficult now not to be bored with the careful encapsula...

[Miriam Waddington is a] quiet and unspectacular poet…, but she has a persuasive sincerity that is very winning. [Her first book, Green World (1945),] established quite clearly the general outlines of her work. The book's dominant theme was the beauty and goodness of the natural world, expressed by recurring images of greenness and growth, and the ugliness and evil of contemporary industrial society, evoked by images of angles, coils, tunnels, walls and "tangles of hot streets". ...