In October 1975, Pat Lowther’s body was found in a creek near Squamish, B.C. That same year, Oxford University Press had accepted for publication A Stone Diary, her third collection of poems. The book was released posthumously in 1977, the same year her husband Roy Lowther was convicted of her murder.

Christine Lowther, the younger of two daughters, introduces her first poetry collection with a brief and devastating preface: “At the age of seven, I lost both parents when my father murdered my mother. Both wrote poetry.” One is shocked twice: by the murder itself and by an implicit indictment against poetry. Before she begins, Lowther states plainly that words have no magic to stop a hammer blow.

New Power is itself a flawed, heartbreaking, necessary book – necessary both as the first eyewitness account of the country’s greatest literary tragedy and as a public catharsis for Lowther herself. She describes the calamity in language that could be more carefully composed, more attentive to sound, rhythm, and the subtleties of meaning, but these poems are what they are – accounts of searing emotional intensity, plainly told. We are harrowed by the tension of an abusive household, by her mother’s self-drowning in books, by the bewilderment of the murder day itself, and by Lowther’s long aftermath of phantom pain.

Lowther lives in B.C.’s Clayoquot Sound, and when she writes in the book’s title poem of finding peace in a forest, the upwelling of relief is absolutely genuine: “this is the only place where she can / do this, wear her grief openly / where all the masks have been stripped / away.” But in many of the poems the grief is unresolved. When she writes of creating a shrine around her mother’s photograph and wanting to eat her mother’s ashes, one has the disturbing thought of being a witness to a ritual healing in which the wound keeps opening up.