The Armies of the Moon

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Gwendolyn MacEwen was one of Canada's most celebrated writers publishing several stories and many works of poetry throughout her career. She was born in Toronto, Ontario on September 1, 1941 to Elsie and Alick MacEwen. As a child she attended public schools in both Toronto and Winnipeg, and when she was seventeen her first poem was published in the Canadian Forum, a journal which published the works of both new and renowned writers. At the age of eighteen she left school to pursue a full time career as a writer and at the same time opened a Toronto coffee house, "The Trojan Horse".

As a child Gwendolyn didn't get the best care from her parents. Her mother was mentally unstable, spending most of her life in institutions and her father was largely an alcoholic. However this may have been what led to her writing being so heavily focused on mythology, dreams, magic, and history. After leaving school Gwendolyn taught herself several different languages including Greek, French, Arabic and Hebrew, which she used to translate many of her poems. Her fluency in several languages is what most likely encouraged her to make references to cultures outside of Canada. Gwendolyn tended to focus on more surreal ideas in her writing and she had her own unique way of expressing them when compared to other poets from her time. A lot of her poetry involved changing the surrealism into reality by using strong imagery and often allegory. The cultures she studied often showed up in her work as part of the overall imagery and allusions to historical events were quite common.

Her volume of poems "The Shadow-Maker" won the Governor General's Award in 1969 and included many poems such as her famous "Dark Pines Under Water". During the mid eighties she was a writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario and then later the University of Toronto. Gwendolyn died in 1987 at the age of 46 from what was believed to have been health problems due to alcohol. Although she was not alive to be present, later that year her collection "Afterworlds" was awarded the Governor General's Award, making it the second time her work had won such a prestigious honour.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacEwan writes with such depth of soul, and with such breadth of content that even in a book ostensibly dedicated thematically to the Lunar Landing, she has time to talk about Lilith, the sex lives of limpets, the life and death of an Egyptian prince, and a gay dancer in East Toronto. She's funny and serious and erotic and no poet pulls me in the way she does.

[L]

"my cat goes behind the shadows
into the majestic dark of shoes
or cryptic corners where the spirits hide"
- 'The Hunt', pg. 5

"I have mislaid many places
in this house without history
there are so many places for places to hide"
- 'I Have Mislaid Something', pg. 7

"spiders' webs describe
the circling of their frail thoughts forever"
- 'Meditations of a Seamstress (1)', pg. 9

"And when I opened the bag
to empty it I found:
a dictionary of dead tongues
a bottle of wine
lunar dust
the rings of Saturn
and the sleeping body of my love."
- 'The Vacuum Cleaner Dream

"something is eating away at me
with splendid teeth"
- 'Memoirs of a Mad Cook', pg. 14

"the imponderable agony
of being here"
- 'A Dance at the Mental Hospital', pg. 36

"into whose future am I moving"
- 'A Letter to Charos', pg. 45

"First the savage flower of the mind opens, catches flies and tigers and locks them in..."
- 'The Golden Hunger', pg. 51

"my fingertips are
the landscapes of ten unknown moons."
- 'Credo', pg. 59

"How did I see the people of my dream when my eyes were closed?
You saw them with the eyes of your mind.
And now that I am awake do I see with my own eyes?
No. You are the eyes of my Mind, and you are here to help me see my Dream."
- 'Written After Coming Out of a Deep Sleep', pg. 62

[Rowan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. It was recommended by someone I respect immensely, but I suspect it's one of those books you read at a certain point in your life, and it takes on meaning because of that. This is not that point in my life. I was excited by the prospect of the title and the structure, but found the poems to be relatively uninteresting - a lot of reflection/insight that seemed overly sentimental and essentially cliché. The language too relied so heavily on easy turns of phrases, clichés, sayings, etc. There are some really surprisingly fascinating lines, but they are few and far between. The sequence at the end, "The Nine Arcanum of the King" was the most interesting part of the book - a pseudo-myth narrative set in what appears to me to be ancient Egypt.

[Susan Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of Gwendolyn MacEwen's poetry was published in 1972, three years after she won the Governor General's Award for The Shadow-Maker. The variety of voices employed here is remarkable, as is MacEwen's ability to take the quotidian to the level of the metaphysical. She's one of the greats.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're going to read a collection, make it Shadowmaker. If you fall in love like I did...well, hell go crazy, take it all in.