Erin Mouré, born in Calgary on 17 April 1955, is the daughter of William Benedict Mouré, a customs broker, and Mary Irene Grendys Mouré, a nurse. She spent her early years in Calgary, where her mother taught her to read when she was four. At the age of six or seven she began writing and making her own books by sewing together pages made from grocery bags. In adolescence she read Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959) and Al Purdy's The Cariboo Horses (1965). These and other Canadian books discovered in her formative years stimulated her attempts at writing. Raised a Catholic, Mouré sees herself as following a specifically Canadian tradition of writing, but also as reaching beyond her prairie background to more universal concerns. She took only two years of formal postsecondary education, and since then her working life has been mainly devoted to her job at VIA Rail Canada. She lived in Vancouver, where she took classes at the University of British Columbia, visited Europe, and she now resides in Montreal. Mouré's abiding concern as a poet is to preserve a living speech that clearly expresses common humanity without evasions of experience.
Her first book, Empire, York Street (1979), introduced to Canadian readers a twenty-three-year-old of remarkable promise whose poems give a distinct impression of contemporary Canadian speech and experience. Places, people, and the body's sensations are important in their own right. Humanity, like the passengers from a late train at dawn on Christmas day, "are all / of the same flawed struggle." The great events and characters of Catholic tradition (the apocalypse, Christ, the Madonna, virgin birth) appear repeated in everyday life so as to bring out the significance of the ordinary and to point out that the existence of the ordinary is itself a miracle. Mouré's verse favors the short free-verse line, sparsely punctuated, sometimes using gaps instead of commas, and abbreviating such words as "with" and "without" to "w/" and "w/o." This device, like Mouré's use of the lower case personal pronoun "i," adds to the feeling of the poetry as dashed down on a pad in the middle of some lurching night shift on the railway for which she works: "i stand / alone in the shrunken coat / of my skin, map future / escape thru ribs & tendons." The true modernity here is not in modish spelling and capitalization but in the sensibility, anxiety, and optimism of this young woman's struggle to articulate her experience. The promise of this volume is in the sureness with which Mouré handles the free-form lyric, the mature range of her subject matter, and her laconic humor. Poems of personal life and the family mix unexpectedly with others--the compassionate and perceptive "Warsaw, 1929"or the deeply humane political poem: "for Rudolf Hess, on his 80th birthday (1974)," which in its way gives voice to "six million cries walled / inside your skull." There is little experiment with different kinds of expression in this volume, but there are many compelling poems on the order of "trusting the song," "Allegiance," and the pungent series"Riel: In the Season of his Birth."
Mouré's next volume, The Whisky Vigil, appeared in 1981. This volume of some sixteen poems opens with the image of Vancouver as the end of the line, an edge from which people fall. The poems are the scattered images of a fall into alcoholism and despair. They form in collage a portrait of the Speaker: a drunken woman and the fractured selves she bears within her in an unholy marriage, that of Mrs. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But, as "Snowbound" makes clear, the Speaker is also gripped by fear of being "dry" as a writer: "I can't wring any more sense out of the words / is what it is / What it is that I can't go on." The divorce of "Divorce From You" suggests, though, release from alcoholism, although its temptations are still fully acknowledged in the contrast between the empty room of the heart and the warmth of the Legion bar.
Two years after publication of The Whisky Vigil, Mouré produced Wanted Alive (1983), a volume containing five poems from the 1981 volume with sixty-six others. Here the railway provides a stock of new images and material that focuses the poet's attention more sharply on people, and the energetic lyrical sequence"Seven Rail Poems" contains some of Mouré's best sustained writing to date: "Saw-tooth trees glancing thru their huddled argument / Their song without name" or the engineer, seeing a loose rail, "pulled emergency, & the rail hit- / twisted up thru the train into the sky, & back down / thru the train again like a stitch." Wanted Alive also shows a growing awareness of the possibilities of forms. Lines are stronger and less arbitrary than in some of her earlier work. "White Rabbit," for example, explores the effects of syntactically closing or leaving lines open at the end, of using verse paragraphs, closed or open-ended, and of deliberately avoiding closure at the end, so as to leave the poem hanging, like the rabbit.
Using the conventions of free linear verse Mouré's lines sometimes slacken to become disguised prose, sometimes overwritten. In her most successful work, Mouré avoids that danger, but it can dog her work even in her recent volume, Domestic Fuel (1985). In "Five Miles From Detonation" the immense horror of nuclear bombardment is inadequately described as "predicament": "I am one survivor / who would envy the dead / In the midst of nuclear predicament, not / its aftermath-." Mouré is better when she uses the harsh imagery of the modern world to render the violence in personal relationships, as in "Fusillade"or "Sowing," in which each line is clear and honest, brutally sustaining her tone. Mouré is a poet who has come a long way in a short time. She offers some surprises; her work is not merely predictable. She has achieved an authentic voice, earthy and strong, one of the strongest voices in her generation of Canadian poets.
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