Poetry
The Wind Our Enemy
Anne Marriott · 1939
Synopsis
A long poem in ten parts about the drought on the Prairies in the thirties. The wind opens the poem and returns from part to part: it presses itself against the houses, fills the mouth with dust, lifts the earth and the Russian thistle. Before it, there was one last good year, when the wheat rippled like silk. Then the crops dry up, the horses grow thin, a woman at her window dreams of a catalogue dress, and the word “relief” keeps coming back in the farmers' voices, in spoken sentences.
Context
The poem appeared in Toronto in 1939 in the Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books series. Its author, who came from the Pacific coast, was twenty-five; she was long regarded as a poet of the Prairies, although most of her work looks to the West Coast. Dorothy Livesay ranked it in 1969 among the documentary poems, a genre she held to be Canadian, and the author included it in 1981 in a selection of old and new poems.
Who it is for
A short text, in free verse where alliteration takes the place of rhyme, made up of brief tableaux and overheard phrases.
Prizes and reception
It remains the work by which its author is known, long read and studied as a documentary poem.
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