SOURCE: A review of The Whirlpool, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, May-June, 1990, p. 21.

In the following review, Ramke, an American poet and educator, praises The Whirlpool for the feeling of poetry it conveys.

The events of Jane Urquhart's first novel [The Whirlpool] take place on various borders; not merely the geographical and geological border between the United States and Canada (on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls), but also on borders between married couples, between those with language and those without, even between the living and the dead. The characters include Maud Grady, the widow of the town's deceased undertaker, a widow about to shed her mourning, whose skin has been next to crepe (milled in Halstead, England, "on secret looms in secret factories,") so long it is now stained a deathly gray. Her child, who "progresses" from his early absolute quiet, to speaking words at random...