Judith Fitzgerald Remembered at The Globe and Mail

Canadian poet and writer Judith Fitzgerald died late last month. At the Globe and Mail, Judy Stoffman remembers the struggles of Fitzgerald's early life and celebrates her poetic accomplishments. From the top:

She was a slight, fragile woman, barely 80 pounds, who survived vicious childhood abuse to become an eloquent and distinctive voice in Canadian letters as the author of 25 books of poetry and two prose works, as well as a literary journalist, blogger and writer-in-residence at various universities. Judith Fitzgerald wrote her way out of psychic pain, using the healing power of language.

“She was in the top range of Canadian poets and completely dedicated to poetry,” recalled Thomas Dilworth, a professor at the University of Windsor who met the poet when she was a writer-in-residence there from 1992 to 94. He became her mentor and wrote the introduction to her final book, Impeccable Regret, published in October.

“Judith was one of the most gifted and most afflicted people in the world of poetry,” Prof. Dilworth said. “Her life was suffering. Sometimes she lived on welfare and on money friends gave or loaned her.” (Among the friends believed to have helped her financially was Leonard Cohen.)

During her time at Windsor, she wrote River (1995), inspired by the broad view of both banks of the Detroit River that she saw from the balcony of her high-rise residence. Prof. Dilworth described the book as a wild poem, a blend of lightness and darkness that contains “extreme pain, hilarity, verbal pyrotechnics, and broad cultural criticism.” He taught it in his graduate seminar. River was a finalist for the province’s Trillium Award.

“I was always amazed and dazzled by what she could do with the written word,” recalled Marty Gervais, whose Black Moss Press in Windsor issued eight of Ms. Fitzgerald’s books, including her only books for children, My Orange Gorange (1985) and Whale Waddleby (1986). “She was brilliant, eccentric, single-minded and could write about the big issues of life, the failure of love, but also about baseball and country music. And she was an amazing poetry editor who helped me a lot – she could transform [an average] manuscript into a gem. She knew the strategies.”

Rosemary Sullivan, now an acclaimed biographer and retired English professor, met Ms. Fitzgerald in the late 1970s when the two hung out at Dooney’s, a literary café on Bloor Street West: “She was exceedingly beautiful, with long red hair and this physical fragility – quite an eye-catching figure, irreverent, funny, and sometimes outrageous. Her poetry was experimental and very interesting.”

Ms. Sullivan, who wrote poetry herself then, recalls it as a time of creative ferment when people such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Al Purdy (a friend of Ms. Fitzgerald) were becoming prominent. “We were dazzled by everything Canadian,” Ms. Sullivan said. “Judith encouraged me and got my poetry (which she edited) published with Black Moss Press.”

Continue on at the Globe and Mail. Also, head to Quill & Quire where Karl Jirgens pays tribute to Fitzgerald and catalogs her many achievements.