February | 2018 | Canada's Early Women Writers: Authors lists

This title rests in a bit of a quagmire. I was reviewing our old entry on Margaret Vance Rody, and was troubled by some inconsistencies. “Margaret,” we inform the public, “published several editions of her two books of verses herself, hoping to augment her income.” Looking through the little that can be found online and in the published sources on our shelves, I discovered that the two titles—Gleanings and Beauty and Thought in Verse—are often considered to be subsequent editions of more-or-less the same collection of poems. The truth is a bit more complicated than that.

Margaret Vance Rody self-published Gleanings in 1925, when she working as a telephone operator in Kamsack, Saskatchewan. The poems included therein were apparently all published in the Kamsack Times initially. This claim is supported by the fact that the second edition of Gleanings was published by the Kamsack Times in 1931. We do not have a copy of the 1925 first edition: as far as the SFU Library specialists can discover, none is extant. We do have the 1931 edition, though, so I listed the poems included in the table below.

In 1942, Margaret Vance Rody released two more volumes of poetry: another collection entitled Gleanings, published by “The Poets Press, The National Poetry Center, ‘Radio City’, Rockefeller Center, New York”; and Beauty and Thought in Verse, published in Vancouver, BC, at the Capitol Printers. The 1942 edition of Gleanings is listed as a “First Edition”; Beauty and Thought in Verse, on the other hand, includes a different publication history: “Published under title Gleanings: 1st edition January 1925; 2nd edition November 1931; 3rd edition February 1942.” It is fairly obvious that what we have here is the difference between the Canadian publication history (including the name change) and the American publication history (which includes only the one printing). Part of this can be explained by the hand-written note in the copy of Gleanings (1942) that Margaret Roy gifted to the University of British Columbia in 1945:

These poems were published in New York after being told by a publisher in Vancouver that Canadian poetry was not wanted by Canadian people.—Margaret Vance Rody

So apparently, shortly after the publication and success (I assume) of the American edition, Margaret Vance Rody was able to sell the idea to a publisher in Vancouver more effectively. It would be interesting to know how that conversation went, and what guided the decisions regarding which poems to include in which editions, for the poems included in the three extant volumes differ significantly. There are drastic changes between the 1931 and 1942 Canadian editions, including the excising of 19 titles. With the 1942 editions, the 27-poem American edition is more-or-less a subset of the 53-poem Canadian edition: only three poems—”Some Day,” “Wreckage of War,” and “You are so Dear to Me”—are unique to the American edition.

Here’s a chart, including—as far as I can determine, as I do not have the complete volumes in my hands—places where poems have been renamed between editions.

Title	Gleanings 1931	Gleanings 1942	Beauty and Thought in Verse 1942
A Grandmother to her Soldier Grandsons			Included
A Lake Madge Reverie	Included		Included
A Letter From the Frozen North	How Santa’s Queen of the Fairies Brought a Letter from the Frozen North		Included
A Message from Santa	Included
A Problem	Included	It is to Laugh: A Problem	Included
A Reply		Included	Included
A Wish
A-Rowing on Lake Madge	Included
And Children Starve Today	Included	Included	Included
And Their Reply (second part of “To the Glorious Dead”?)			Included
Bobbing the Baby’s Hair	Included
Card of Thanks		Included	Included
Christmas Bells			Included
Christmas Greetings – 1925	Included
Fragments	Included	Hope: Fragments	Included
Freedom	Included
Garden Gossip		Included	Included
Gleanings	Included		Included
God’s Covenant	Included		Included
Gracie Fields			Included
Grey Eyes and Blue	Included		Included
His Mother’s Prayer	Included	Included	Included
Hope	Included	Hope: Some Day	Hope Someday
If You Could Know			Included
Leaves	Included
Leaves of Memory	Included
Little Bare Feet	Included		Included
Little Black Bear		Included	Included
Love’s Not Always Blind	Included	Contrasts: Love’s Not Always Blind	Included
Love’s Reverie		Included	Included
Maudlin Sentiment			Included
Memories of Childhood		Included	Included
Message of the Pansy	Included	Included	Included
Mother of Mine			Included
My Irish Flower	Included		Included
My Lodge	Included	Included	Included
My Sister’s Keeper	Included		Included
Ode to Spring	Included
Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men			Included
Poppy Day			Included
Poverty			Included
Prairie Winds		Included	Included
Redemptive Love	Included
Reflections of an Old, Old House		Included	Included
Remembrance	Included		Included
Roses of Vancouver			Included
Silken Hose		It Is To Laugh: Silken Hose	Included
Some Day		Included
Somehow or Other	Included
Sonnet		Contrasts: Sonnet	Included
Spotted Curtains			Included
Spotted Curtains		Included
Sunshine vs. Raindrops	Included	Included	Included
The Anthem		Included	Included
The Beauty Seeker	Included
The Call of the West	Included		Included
The Canadian Hamlet	To Canadian Hamlet		Included
The Kingdom of Right	Included
The Palace and the Cottage	Included
The Price of War	Included	Is this the same as “Wreckage of War”?
The Switchers	Included
The Trials of Life	Included
The Wood Folks’ Anthem		Included	Included
The Wreckage of War			Included
To A Bride	Included	Included	Included
To a Little Bird	Included
To Robert Burns		Included	Included
To the Glorious Dead	Included		Included
To the Pioneer Campers of Lake Madge			Included
To Wilhelmina Stitch	Included		Included
Transformation	Included
Wee Marion and the Big Black Night			Included
Wishes	Included
Wolves of the Night			Included
Wreckage of War		Included
You Are So Dear To Me		Included
Your Mother’s Love	Included		Included

Rowan, Alice Margaret. Kenilworth and Other Poems (Winnipeg: Peerless, 1934).

I am currently digging through a manila folder that I have found, buried on a shelf, labelled “Insufficient Information” back in the 1980s when the initial project was amassing data through letters and visits to archives. I have discovered more information about a number of authors, but not much about Alice Margaret Rowan Gray, except that she lived in Winnipeg at least between 1920 and 1940, had a BA from the University of Manitoba, and was a member of the amateur theatre world in Winnipeg, where she is listed as Alice Rowan-Gray. She published two books of poetry: her first slim volume, entitled simply Poems, was published in 1925; her second (perhaps last), Kenilworth and Other Poems, was published in 1934.

About the title poem, “Kenilworth,” the author tells us:

This fantasy was written in 1931, two years after my first visit to Kenilworth, on which occasion our guide was an old actor, whose eloquence cast a spell upon us, and re-built for me, at least, the mouldering ruins of what was once the lovely home of Leicester in the days of the ‘Virgin Queen.’

In the folder I found, to my delight, a photocopy of the entirety of the latter volume, which I share with you here, in page images and a searchable pdf.