[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". Within human society, the one positive liberating force was seen as love, whether love in the sense of charity or "loving-kindness" or love in the sense of sexual attraction and union. Unlike most of her Canadian contemporaries at that time, Mrs. Waddington did not speak in terms of socialist doctrine, nor indeed of any dogma, and although there were occasional references to the hope for a better social order there was no attempt to be specific about the causes of social chaos or the means of social amelioration. These early poems were simple, colourful, melodic and easy; they had spontaneity and verve, a youthful affirmation and exuberance modified only slightly by twinges of pity, anger or disgust.
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