SOURCE: "Museum & World," in Canadian Literature, No. 104, Spring, 1985, pp. 134-36.

In the following excerpt, Lemire-Tostevin offers a thematic discussion of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan.

Jane Urquhart has chosen a museum as the setting for her third book. The poems of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan hover in and out of the rooms and gardens of Versailles in the persona of Montespan who was for a while a favourite mistress of Louis XIV. They pause over catalogued items and saved artifacts like "loose fragments drawn into new configurations." They shift behind windows and over brocade coverings of baroque beds; they witness and conjure devious plots; they settle in glass coffins or the frozen ground under lifeless monuments and leafless trees of the carefully kept winter gardens. The six photographs of Versailles by Jennifer Dickson are very effective in both capturing and adding to the...