Colleen Thibaudeau

Join us on Saturday November 29th at the London Public Library Central Branch for poet Peggy Roffey’s presentation “Colleen Thibaudeau’s Big Sea Vision” at the James Reaney Memorial Lecture.

This year, in the spirit of metaphor, the 2025 James Reaney Memorial Lecture steps to the side and shows the “she” beside the “he”: James Reaney’s wife, poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012).

In a combination of photo images, presentation, and readings, Peggy Roffey and readers from London’s poetry community will explore Colleen Thibaudeau’s unique voice, sensibility, and metaphor-making artistry.

Thibaudeau’s ‘Big Sea Vision’ helps us enter the very nature of metaphor, illuminating the connectedness of things, people, times and places, showing the as-yet unseen inside something else. Her big sea vision is all over her poems like fingerprints, a vision worth holding in a fragmenting world.

The 2025 Lecture is the first one devoted to her words and life. It marks another peak for Colleening 2025, a year-long celebration of her centenary. The last scheduled event is Antler River Poetry’s evening of Colleen Thibaudeau poems, December 3, 7 pm, at the Landon Branch Library.

About the presenter: Peggy Roffey is a Londoner who did her Master’s Thesis at UWO on Colleen’s poetry to 1975 and was a frequent reader alongside Colleen. Peggy has also had an interesting career in organizational culture and leadership development at St. Joseph’s Health Care London and at UWO (Western). She taught English Renaissance Literature and Canadian Literature at Western for the last 15 years of her career.

Where: London Public Library, Central Library Lawson Room, 251 Dundas Street, London, Ontario
When: Saturday November 29, 1 pm — 3 pm.
Admission is free. Please register to attend the lecture — the EventBrite registration works for both the onsite event at the London Public Library and online via Zoom Webinar: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/peggy-roffey-colleen-thibaudeaus-big-sea-vision-tickets-1802841450309?aff=oddtdtcreator

This year’s James Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrates the legacy of poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012), the late wife of poet and playwright James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney (1926-2008). Our grateful thanks to the London Public Library and Words Festival for giving the lecture a new home and partnership.

September 18, 2025 — Thank you, Julie Berry, for curating and organizing a magical Colleening 2025 evening celebrating Colleen Thibaudeau’s poetry in her home town of St. Thomas, Ontario.

Performing at the Elgin County Railway Museum’s Rolling Stock Gallery were fourteen wonderful readers: Joe Preston, Barb Hoskins, Peter Bloch-Hansen, Cynthia  Snyder, Mike Baker, Rose Gibson, John Allen, Sally Martyn, Kayla Berdan, Bruce Parker, Steve Peters, Julie Berry, Susan Wallace and James Stewart Reaney. Many of the poems they read were about St. Thomas where Colleen Thibaudeau lived for much of her childhood.

Thanks also to audio-visual technicians, Devon Church and Dawn Garton, who made sure Colleen’s words and images more than filled the cavernous Rolling Stock Gallery, home to locomotives from the early 20th century.

Bruce Parker, who read Thibaudeau’s poem “The Glass Cupboard,” recalls that “The train museum, as you can imagine, is an enormous, echo-ey venue, with natural reverberation for the speaking voices. I must admit, it was rather cool to read in front of 200 tons of locomotive.” 

Colleening 2025 is a celebration of
the centenary of poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012).