SOURCE: Rompkey, Ronald. “Island Pastoral.” Canadian Forum 73, no. 832 (September 1994): 36–37.

In the following positive review, Rompkey praises The Shipping News for its “poetic power.”

E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is a rich novel set in Newfoundland and strikingly free of the conventions that often define it in fiction. Here we find none of the vaunted inner strength, none of the preoccupation with the elements, none of the sentimental self-justification for living there in the first place, none of the maudlin religiosity, no celebration of those fine rugged shores, no self-conscious literary language. Instead, there is a powerful sense of a place caught in the dilemma posed by modernity. The novel is a poetic triumph, and its triumph lies in the reworking of the pastoral.

The pastoral is as old as Virgil's Georgics. It concentrates on the slow exploration and cataloging of rural pursuits from the point of view...