This relatively short biography – the first to appear since Pat Lowther died 25 years ago – is the result of Toby Brooks’ longstanding devotion to the poet and her work. Brooks, who counselled battered women for 13 years, places great emphasis on the violence of her subject’s life. Four chapters deal with Lowther’s brutal murder by her husband, his attempted cover-up, the trial, and its aftermath. Lowther’s poems are inserted as somewhat literal accompaniments to the narrative of her life.

The perennial problem for biographers of victims is to avoid turning them into saints and writing hagiography. It is a danger that Brooks does not altogether escape as she describes the forces that oppressed her subject. Lowther left school at 16 to work as a key-punch operator, became pregnant and married two years later, and then entered a second marriage to a self-mutilating, troubled man. Their problems were exacerbated by unemployment, poverty, and his resentment of her writing success. Brooks also notes that acclaim for Lowther’s work was withheld by an Ontario-centric critical establishment: one chapter is entitled “National Recognition – Except for Ontario.”

Lowther was recklessly unprotective of her own safety. She published poems to a lover, and left letters to him lying around the house. As a spokesperson for battered women, Brooks predictably refutes those who suggest that Lowther unknowingly colluded with her abusive husband and invited violence. Yet had the literary critic taken precedence over the counsellor in Brooks, she might have taken stock of the exigencies of the artist’s life. Sometimes the risk-taking of the poet’s work and the life that the poet lives converge as a dangerous but inevitable part of the creative process. This is a complex subject, which the biographers of Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Sylvia Plath have struggled to address; Brooks does not. Similarly, a more ambitious literary biographer might have interwoven the story of Lowther’s life with a sophisticated reading of her poetry, so that each illuminated the other.

All the same, Brooks’ achievement should not be underestimated. She has collected materials and conducted interviews, notably with Lowther’s elderly mother, to preserve information that might have been lost forever. She has welded it into a coherent and readable book and provided a useful chronology and bibliography. The result is a valuable addition to the sparse work done on Lowther.