SOURCE: Owen, I. M. “Writers Out of Residence.” Books In Canada 15, no. 4 (May 1986): 48-9.

In the following excerpt, Owen praises both the clarity and the ambiguity of The Light in the Piazza.

I've always thought that the most expressive lines in the “Canadian Boat Song” published anonymously in 1829 are not the much-quoted ones about the lone shieling but the refrain:

Fair are these meads, these hoary woods                                                                                                                         are grand, But we are exiles from our fathers' land. 

(Or words to that effect; there doesn't seem to be a book in my house that contains the poem.) Not just from our land, you see: from our fathers' land. That's been characteristic of English Canadians from the beginning—not of French Canadians, whose fathers' land disowned them in 1763 and turned altogether alien to them three decades later. But other Canadians remain exiles—from the Thirteen Colonies, the British Isles, Western...