SOURCE: "Poetic Emergenc(i)es," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 44, Fall, 1991, pp. 133-41.

York is a Canadian educator and author of The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence (1988). In the following favorable review, York discusses WSW (West South West), focusing on Mouré's use of language and innovative poetic structures.

"Once again I begin a long praise of the accidental." The line is Erin Mouré's, from her new collection WSW (West South West) but it could just as easily stand as an epigraph to the works of many contemporary Canadian women poets. Poets such as Mouré and Mary di Michele, as well as Susan Glickman, Jan Conn, Lorna Crozier, Daphne Marlatt, Libby Scheier, and Leona Gom, are finding in the chancy, the accidental, and the provisional, bases for a new feminist poetics. The New...