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.
Lady, in the country of my coming there will be lush peaches ripe on ev’ry tree. Ev’ry little cloud will glide clear as a magic lantern slide. The golden serpent sun will throw his body like a light lasso about the heart of each dark centre, to fashion flowers of strange splendour. You will fill your panier, lass, with blooms like ornamental glass You will hear their Christmas chime all the glorious summertime.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1950
Composer John Beckwith set music to “Serenade” and entered it in the 1950 CBC Songwriting Contest. It won a prize and was performed on CBC Radio by Charles Jordan (baritone). “Serenade” was performed by Russell Braun (baritone) at the John Beckwith Songbook concert in March 2021.
Pamela Terry Beckwith, John Beckwith, and Colleen Thibaudeau (1960)
( ( 0 ) ) In this audio clip, soprano Katy Clark performs “Serenade” at Wordsfest November 5, 2023 in London, Ontario.
Yes we are that too: we are everything who feel it. Everything that has meaning has the same meaning as angels: these hoverers and whirrers: occupied with us. Men may be in the parkgrass sleeping: or be he who sits in his shirtsleeves every blessed Sunday: rasping away at his child who is catching some sunshine: from the sticky cloud hanging over the Laura Secord factory: and teetering on the pales of the green iron fence: higher up than the briary bushes. I pass and make no sound: but the silver and whirr of my bicycle going round: but must see them who don’t see: get their fit, man and child: let this elastic moment stretch out in me: till that point where they are inside and invisible. It is not to afterward eat a candy: picket that factory: nor to go by again and see that rickety child on the fence. When the band of the moment breaks there will come angelic recurrence.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1977
“This Elastic Moment” is included in Colleen Thibaudeau’s The Artemesia Book(1991), available from Brick Books.
Our grateful thanks to translator Patricia Godbout, who created this French version of Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem for Ellipse magazine in 1990.
Élastique, ce moment
Oui, nous sommes aussi cela : nous sommes tout ce qui est sensible. Tout ce qui possède un sens possède celui des anges : qui planent et qui vrombissent : veillent sur nous. Des hommes dorment-ils dans l’herbe du parc : un homme s’assoit-il en bras de chemise tous les dimanches : parle d’une voix grinçante à son enfant qui s’amuse au soleil : perçant le nuage collant au-dessus de l’usine Laura Secord : chancelant sur les pieux de la clôture de fer peinte en vert : bien plus haut que les buissons d’églantier. Je passe sans bruit : mais l’argent mais le vrombissement des roues de ma bicyclette : je dois voir qui ne me voit pas : prendre la mesure de l’homme et de l’enfant : laisser ce moment élastique s’étirer en moi : jusqu’à ce qu’ils soient intérieurs, invisibles. Nul besoin d’aller ensuite manger des friandises : ni de dresser des piquets devant l’usine : ou de repasser par là pour apercevoir l’enfant vaciller sur la clôture. Une fois brisé l’élastique du moment, viendra le retour angélique.
(Traduit par Patricia Godbout, (1990) Ellipse. (44) 99.)
Colleen Thibaudeau at the Writing in Our Time poetry conference in 1979, Vancouver, BC (Photo by Michael Lawlor)
Lights from the Highway sparser, softer now and the Gorst lights gone and their house gone away, just lost rib to new life in dark seas, just dark seven sleepers gone seasabout the foot of our hill, just the foot of the hill and a great cave opening up.
Lights from the glass cupboard !spark! the house dark; And it’s up to the glass cupboard now! It looms at James’ headheight, three paces from the kitchen sink, one from table, length approximately my armspan, crafted by an Albertan who loved the bush, the hills.
The Bay Highway kindles to blue Italian grotto glasses; and green glasses, safe-and-wide as Sweden; and cheap little ruby liqueurs sing; and cocktail Libbys supermart violent and fresh from fists that swung axes, pounded down a territory and rolled Malcolm Lowry into the soundmad surf dazzling no warning…
By an Albertan who loved the bush, the hills, who made this cupboard ark that tends the tides of dream. They light, they guard the house, glow like an icon of Mike Todd, thirty-odd glasses, touched off by random headlights moving toward the Bay.
Colleen Thibaudeau’s short story “Wild Turkeys” draws on her great-aunt Belle’s memories of growing up on a farm in Grey County.
Thibaudeau wrote this “getting-of-wisdom” story in 1946 when she lived with her aunt while studying at the University of Toronto. The story was published in the University College magazine The Undergrad [II (1946-47), pages 22-27]. Thibaudeau mentions how her great-aunt shared stories from her girlhood in an interview from 1979:
Don MacKay: One of the stories that you published in the Undergrad, “Wild Turkeys,” seems to be recollecting the Markdale experience.
Colleen Thibaudeau: Well, see, I lived [while at U of T] with my great aunt. Great Aunt Belle was the second sister of my grandmother Stewart.… It was just a pleasure to live with her because she had a slightly easier way of remembering things. My grandma was fun in many ways, but she was just so hurried and harried all the time that she never told you anything. But Aunt Belle was a more gentle easy-going person. And a couple of times, you see, she’d just begin to go into stories like that. So it was from a couple of things she said to me that I reconstructed or made up that story. She wouldn’t have said more than a couple of little hints. [Excerpted from “Colleen Thibaudeau: A Biographical Sketch”, Brick, Issue 5, Winter 1979, pages 6-11.]
From “Wild Turkeys”: “… In the old days it seemed as if all the mornings were like the first morning of the world, and I could have run forever through the tall grass. Run and not wearied….”
Colleen Thibaudeau wrote The City Underground in 1949 and it was broadcast on CBC Radio. The story was later published in Canadian Short Stories, edited by Robert Weaver and Helen James, Oxford University Press, 1952 (pages 128-135).
Colleen Thibaudeau 