SOURCE: "Distances," in Canadian Forum, Vol. LXIII, No. 731, August-September, 1983, p. 43.

Marshall is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, and professor whose writings include the poetry collection Playing with Fire (1984) and the novel Changelings (1991). In the following mixed review of Wanted Alive, he examines Mouré's use of language and her compassion for the human condition.

Erin Mouré's first book of poems, Empire, York Street, was highly praised and was nominated for the Governor-General's Award in 1979. Her second, Wanted Alive, is a substantial collection at 112 pages, and is also impressive in its way. If I am unable to enter her world very completely, perhaps the fault is mine.

It may be an odd, rather angular manner that tends to distance the reader. One poem, for instance, begins this way:

        Say there is a woman
        in the locked-up cornfield.
        She is making a desert for herself, not
          me.
        Like...