Jay Macpherson said in the late 1950s that her "main interest in life is the relation between literature and myth." This remark illuminates her writing, which owes both its complexity and its power to her ability to create with subtlety a world dense with classical and biblical allusions and to establish links among myth, the Bible, fairy tales, other literature, and personal experiences in her poetry. She is a key figure in one of the most important of modern Canadian literary traditions which begins with the mythopoeic criticism of Northrop Frye and the poetry and drama of James Reaney and reaches forward to Margaret Atwood. Macpherson's attitude toward myth shares much with Frye and Reaney because, like them, she sees myth as the underlying structure of contemporary literature and experience. The myths which she emphasizes, however, are specifically female--Inanna, Hecate Trivia, Psyche--and in this regard she has been...