Printers Hilary Neary, Stephen Sword, and Mike Baker at The Forge and Anvil Museum in Sparta, Ontario. (Photo by James Stewart Reaney)
Wednesday August 27, 2025 — Printers and compositors Hilary Neary (left), Stephen Sword, and Mike Baker pose with Colleen Thibaudeau’s 1965 classicLozenges. A detail from the 2025 edition’s cover design is in the foreground at The Forge and Anvil Museumin 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.
Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem “The Train” from Lozenges (1965)Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem “The Hockey Stick” from Lozenges (1965)
Colleen Thibaudeau (seated) with her friends, Summer 1943 in St. Thomas, Ontario. (Joyce Draper is on the left and June Rose is seated at the top.)
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.
‘Going to be one hot summer for sure,’ said Uncle Willie who had set his heart on growing watermelons in a cindery patch at the very end of his Garden.
‘No one is going to look there for them.’ He told no one but us, planted them at night. Joyce and I biked sweatily out to our first job, tenderly
moved translucent baby cabbages, made little hats for them, carried water endlessly and longed for the promised crisp bite, the crisp juices
reviving, ‘turning us into real people’, he said. We were just at that turning point, thirteen years old; we dreamed of the watermelon promise.
He said they were ‘coming along nicely’, green taut, bulging over the hillside, as yet undiscovered by the boys. September came.
The boys came. One Saturday morning we saw yellowing leaves only and every watermelon gone. Yet the anticipation of the melon miracle
seemed to have turned us, Joyce and I, into ‘real people’. And we pondered this, purposely noisy with our milkshakes, solacing ourselves with second best.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1991
“Watermelon Summer” is from The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.
( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Sonja Gustafson perform the poem set to music by Stephen Holowitz.
Long after the “Watermelon Summer,” Colleen and Joyce remained friends and Joyce grew up to be a talented artist. She once made a “bon voyage” cake (complete with arc de triomphe!) when Colleen left to teach in France.
Colleen Thibaudeau and Joyce Draper Coles, St. Thomas, Ontario, October 1950.Joyce’s 1946 exhibition at Central Tech in Toronto 1946 painting by Joyce Draper Coles (1925-2020) of her Toronto neighbourhood
The child who never lived was the real child whose lovely eyes were seas and little limbs were lullabies and lovely seas
He said, my mother is a street where strangers pass her hair winds like the wind round wooden poles
Her lovely eyes are seas Her hair is wind that shakes the elder tree
He said, my mother is a stair where strangers pass and when night rocks me round then I am sure
Her hair is wind that shakes the elder tree her eyes are seas
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1967
“Lullaby of the Child for the Mother” can be found in My granddaughters are combing out their long hair (Coach House Press,1977) and also in The Artemisia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.
( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Sonja Gustafson perform the poem set to music by Oliver Whitehead.
The blue of the Swimming Pool isn’t a real blue And there is no easy way to describe it as water; It transforms an ordinary backyard and the ordinary people Who roar up in trucks, sitting stunned for a moment Now that there is no longer the moving belt bearing them on; Getting unbelieving out of the tucks, setting up playpens, Getting undressed and into bathing suits and finally entering The Pool.
The Cat sits (while no one is looking) on the portulaca In the rock garden and looks at the people in the unbelievable Not real blue of the Swimming Pool. There are the very young Grandparents, their own married young and the spouses And the assorted babies of the married young. Muscular, Shining, joyous, the babies unafraid, they all accept the water Moment: fountain of life or very womb.
And the Cat looks on In the sharp sunlight and drinks in at the eye the not real blue Of the Swimming Pool and the swimmers transformed and moving Freely, ordinary and beautiful.
Janet’s postcard from Brazil goes hand to hand as the sender intended, intending no ending in sending to those
well-wishers and stay-at-homes; well-wishing, time-spending, with message unending comes
all heron feather halo’d, eyes that thrill in the charcoal-dusted face, sending unending: the postcard from Brazil.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1984
“Janet’s Postcard From Brazil” is from The Martha Landscapes (1984) and available from Brick Books.
Prof. Don Hair (1937-2023), a fan of the poem, recalls that “Janet’s postcard came with the request that it be passed around to friends.” (Donald S. Hair, A Professor’s Life, p. 484)
“Balloon” also appears in The Wind Has Wings: Poems From Canada (1968, Oxford University Press) and A Poke In The I — A Collection of Concrete Poems (2001, Candlewick Press).
In this poem, Thibaudeau directs readers to read it in two ways to produce two unique poems:
(1) One puddle in the lane looks clear down to Picardy Sees worlds deep stones like red blood flowers white bones Clear common brown drop lives washed (by) tears forever bones (in) Picardy.
(2) One sees clear puddle worlds common in deep brown the stones drop lane like lives looks red washed clear blood (by) tears down flowers forever to white bones Picardy bones (in) Picardy.
Markdale, Ontario in 1916: John Stewart Thibaudeau (Colleen’s father) with his mother, father, and youngest brother.
Written in 1968, “Going Straight Across the Lines then Down Each Column till it’s Finished” was first published in Air 13.14.15 in 1973 and then in The “Patricia” Album and other poems (1992), published by Moonstone Press.
Colleen Thibaudeau alludes to her father’s military service in France (1916-1919) in this note from The “Patricia” Album: “Not being from the Souwesto Region originally, I still see it as “other”. I am not surprised when I read in The London Free Press about “the men from Erieau”, some of whom would have been among those who looked down the lane to Picardy.”
Colleen Thibaudeau in Vancouver, BC, 1969. Photo by Pat Yeomans.
Thibaudeau’s use of free verse forms and concrete poetry came from her French literature studies at university. For example, French symbolist poetStéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) described the space around words and groupings of words in a free verse or prose poem as necessary separations that direct the reader’s movement through it, much like “… Music as it is heard at a concert….”:
“Quite a few techniques found [in Music] seem to me to belong to Letters, and so I pick them up. Let the genre become one like the symphony, little by little, beside the personal declamation, leaving ancient verse intact – I venerate it and attribute to it the empire of passion and of dream – while it would be the time to treat, preferably, as it follows naturally, subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect, not to exclude them from Poetry – the unique source.” — Stéphane Mallarmé from the Preface to Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hazard / Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (1897) [English translation by Mary Ann Caws, 1981].
(See also Colleen Thibaudeau’s 1973 poem“From Verlaine’s Impressions” – a transliteration of Paul Verlaine’s “Impression fausse”.)
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, a new collection from visual arts publisher Primary Information, includes Colleen Thibaudeau’s concrete poems from her 1965 book Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things.
Inspired by Italian artist Mirella Bentivoglio’s exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women at the 1978 Venice Biennale, editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre have brought together 50 writers and artists from 17 countries to trace women’s use of this form during the period.
Thibaudeau’s earlier work used free verse forms, and an interest in concrete poetry came perhaps from her French literature studies and poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880-1918) Calligrammes:
The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph. [Apollinaire in a letter to André Billy, 1916] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes
Conceived as a small format book, Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things draws on everyday themes and objects from children’s lives – bell, ball, hockey stick, balloon – and invites readers old and young to discover the picture the words make.
Colleen’s book of concrete poems, Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things, was published in 1965 by Alphabet Press in London, Ontario. Her husband James Reaney (1926-2008) typeset the poems and also designed the cover.
Colleen Thibaudeau 