"Her death is a body blow to the cause of poetry in Canada. She has for ten years been producing ... the most stirring, lyrical, meaningful, and committed poetry of any written by man or woman in Canada." These words spoken during a November 1975 CBC broadcast by Dorothy Livesay express the conviction shared by a growing number of readers that with the murder of Pat Lowther Canadian poetry lost one of its most original and accomplished voices.

Pat Lowther, born Patricia Louise Tinmuth in Vancouver in 1935, was the oldest child of working-class parents, Virginia and Arthur Tinmuth. She grew up in North Vancouver, where her father worked as caretaker for the municipal water board. Quick, imaginative, somewhat solitary, Lowther showed an interest in writing even as a child.

At sixteen she left school and worked at a number of clerical jobs. An early marriage--to Bill Domphousse in 1953--ended in...