Colleen Thibaudeau

Miniatures

I
I look through a circular window:
I make a frame of small twigs with budding leaves;
Inside this the first spring skippers are jumping:
Yellow and pink, yellow and pink.
The soundless rhythm of their feet jumping
Becomes visible as bubbles on this cup of tea.

II
The grass-seed sower casts, casts,
And behind her the birds come
Greedy for her hopes. They are eating up
This poem almost as quickly as I can make it.

III
The long-legged man is again whistling
As he goes early to work.   Seen
Through a basement bedroom window,
he will always be recalled by boots and jeans,
and the whistling that encircles him completely
in his day’s dancing.

IV
Anne Brontë’s grave is planted completely
and mysteriously: “No one knows who tends it.”
This time it is lined by yellow pansies,
and fixes (for a short spell),
our hammered-by-the-sea-winds straying thoughts.

V
“The little island of the year,” my mother says
and so from desert island it grows;
populated by family: Family Reunion. Disquiet
about estrangement motivates roots-out-of tumbleweed:
annual habitation (strangely)
magnets from a tiny stamp or the kiss
that fixes it on the ‘just-a-reminder’ postcard.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1991

“Miniatures” is from The Artemisia Book (1991), available from Brick Books. The poem is also included in AlvegoRoot Theatre’s play Colleening: The Letters and Poetry of Colleen Thibaudeau from November 2025.

East: Timesend’s Grove

in the green oakgrove at Timesend’s
is blowing a pink rose special to that shade:
peculiar, wild and soft, not lasting, it has affinity
with what my Dolphin Baby said to me:
We’re all aswim in one big sea

out lying on the green grass beside the hedge and under the scrub
oak trees, I was watching two children coming through the dust
knee-high (and the bees were about and were zooming after those
yellow warblers that go lacing through the hedge) and with never
a sign they drifted over to the grove and snitched each one a whole
banner of roses that they held close to their jerseys till they were
nearly out of sight when suddenly they loosened up and began
madly swinging roses. Then only the mid-day left very hot
and I was listening to the wash-wash voice of my baby who was asleep
and who suddenly said, We’re all aswim in one big sea.

O Joy, the lightest tap can stir a failing sun
can give the labouring globe a spin
that starts a staggering miraculous run
of roses, trees and we and we
who do all swim in one big sea.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1954

“East: Timesend’s Grove” is from Colleen Thibaudeau’s four-part poem “Four Corners: King’s Park, Manitoba” and appears in The Artemesia Book: Poems Selected and New, available from Brick Books.

On November 29, 2025, the James Reaney Memorial Lecture was given by poet Peggy Roffey, and the title of her lecture was Colleen Thibaudeau’s ‘Big Sea’ Vision. Inspired by Thibaudeau’s idea of how we are “all aswim in one big sea,” Roffey explained that “The poem shows how the affinity between the rose and what the baby says is created, and how that summer moment enters the speaker’s mind and memory.”

For the full version of Peggy Roffey’s lecture on Colleen Thibaudeau’s poems, see the Words Festival YouTube channel.

Wednesday August 27, 2025 — Printers and compositors Hilary Neary (left), Stephen Sword, and Mike Baker pose with Colleen Thibaudeau’s 1965 classic Lozenges. A detail from the 2025 edition’s cover design is in the foreground at The Forge and Anvil Museum in Sparta, Ontario where the second edition was printed.

The Lozenges second edition is part of Colleening 2025, a celebration of the centenary of Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012).

( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Hilary Neary and Mike Baker read poems from Lozenges.

The Tin Shop

The Tin Shop never sounded tin
it sounded canaries;
because of the Great Depression
no one wanted eaves
but everyone wanted canaries.

It became the place where
we changed skates
sharpened them
traced out our initials
on the floor,
sipped cocoa.

The Tinsmith bred canaries
that lived in tin apartments
elaborate as palaces
spacious and filling all
the upper air
with communal sopranos.

The Tin Shop never sounded tin
it became a meeting place
for men
displaced workers
all their strength now
gone into those deep voices
vibrantly disaffected
politically haranguing
words / scored as deeply
in the wooden floors as
our skate blades.

The canaries sang and moulted
a world of yellow.
The men’s words, strong,
bedevilled, are they in the
end gone like the
songs and the feathers?

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1984

“The Tin Shop” first appeared in The Martha Landscapes (1984) and is also included in The Artemesia Book (1991), both available from Brick Books.

( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Steve Peters, the current owner of the Tin Shop, read Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem.