Melancholy Ain't No Baby
Canadian Literature No. 115, Winter, 1987
Patricia Young’s Melancholy Ain’t No Baby ranges less widely. Like many other women poets, she writes about what is close up, so close to home that many men cannot even see it:
The absolute terror
of living like this. With food on the table,
wine in the fridge, a good man in my bed.
Her perspective illuminates common experience, not only from a woman’s point of view but also from a child’s. Men write of their love with a gratitude that sets it aside from the business of living.
But for Patricia Young love is something which presents its own problems — children, purpose, identity — and has to be coped with daily. Moreover it is imbricated with the one language which has
to make do for all things. Her poetry is lively, unsettling, and very attractive.
Andrew Taylor
