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". ...

Reading The Visitants, I was struck by the absence of something I couldn't exactly place: some quality, some attitude that these 40 poems simply didn't contain. Anger? Sorrow? Bitterness? No, because in a few public lyrics, a few civil elegies, Miriam Waddington does express these dark emotions. What was it, this absence? It took me a while to realize that I was missing all sense of fear, and that The Visitants is a fearless book. Its main preoccupations are death, old age, and solitude—...

[Waddington's language in Say Yes is close to the conventional lyric, appears fresh,] surprises with sudden illumination, touches us with her gaiety and convinces us of her gravity. Her language enlivens the dark. Acutely aware of the loss of love, of language, of a familiar world, she confronts it directly and articulates it honestly. With a possible hint from Dr. Williams she has devised a rather baroque, run-on form made up of lines of two to four feet into which the most prosaic sentences may be ...

In a poem entitled Losing Merrygorounds, Miriam Waddington regrets that loss as well as "… the careful prose / of growing up". Indeed, throughout The Glass Trumpet, one feels that Miss Waddington is willing to abandon care entirely to avoid writing "prose". The battle against prose is exhausting, finding its expression in run-on syntax and sentimental attitudes. It includes lots of crying, wishing, dreaming, and singing. Half of everything seems to be blinded or blinding. ...