1970: A Novel Poem, Elizabeth Rhett Woods’ fifth book of poems, is in effect, a single long work of many and diverse parts, which tracks the course of events in one year of the poet’s life, from “Winter” through “Spring” and Summer” to “Fall”.

In the outer world, 1970 was the year of the Kent State murders in the U.S., and the War Measures Act in Canada; in the inner world of the then- thirty-year-old poet, 1970 was the year of her marriage and of her personal revolutionary crisis that October.

“Winter” begins with a sonnet on death, introducing one of the themes that threads through the texts of all four seasons. The story itself begins with the wake held for the poet’s 30th birthday, and continues with a move to a new house; and acid trips on a remote farm (where two brave souls act “in loco parentis to infants terrible”, taking care of such mundane chores as cooking meals, and keeping the house warm, while their friends run wild over the farm. Like children, the trippers are reluctant to go indoors when dinner is called, and “…dawdled back/up the hill (which lifted us, making the climb/both necessary and possible)….”). A second theme is also introduced, that of the poet’s continuing struggle with and against the powerful forces love, lust, and independence.

The poet and her friends’ are sporadically involved in helping evaders of the Vietnam War to become landed immigrants in Canada; a task which increases in difficulty when, “…we needed two wives/one for the man I loved, and/one for the man I was making love to...”, a dilemma which is finally resolved when circumstances force her and the man she loves to become engaged. “I must accept my fate/ I couldn’t believe my luck”, a lack of belief that dooms the marriage before it even begins.

“Spring” as befits the season, is a collection of experiments with poetic forms—villanelles, sestinas, and pantoums, among others—and ways of patterning the poems on the page. The subject of these poems are events which occur throughout the year, including moving to a new house; visiting a farm with a view to renting it; the poet’s fascination with subway trains, “…the need/to confront the eye of the tunnel”, and her brief affair with a junkie in “Caught Smack in the Middle Blues”.

“Summer” begins “That was a hot one,/…the heat/climbed like a sailor/into the shrouded sky”. The temperature and humidity soaring into the 80s day after day, is expressed through the repetition of the phrase ‘the heat, the heat’ which beats through the entire section, creating the context and atmosphere for such unorthodox behaviours as sunning topless in the backyard, looting a neighbour’s house, and springing the poet’s betrothed from jail on their wedding day.

In “Fall”, the poet tries to escape from both the life she’s been living, and herself, by taking the train as far west as she can go, only to find her demons are even more in evidence in her solitary cabin perched on the edge of the ocean, where she punishes both herself and her newly-acquired dog for her pain, before coming to terms, for the time being at least, with who she is, and will always be.

1970 is a novel poem because of the narrative which threads through it, and also for the poet’s forays into various verse forms and how they are displayed upon the page. For example, she breaks long solid poems like sestinas into cleverly placed lines that carry the reader’s eye and comprehension pleasurably down the page, while inviting second and subsequent readings in order to discern and enjoy the underlying patterns of rhyme and repetition.

1970 is a window into the lives of a small group of ‘hippies’; a way of life too often over-romanticized, over-brutalized, or under-appreciated, or sometimes all three, at once; a window offering a largely unjudgmental view of the beginning of the end of ‘the 60s’. And yet, the collage of newspaper headlines from the relevant months which introduces each section, points up the fact that, for all their involvement in helping draft dodgers, the poet and her friends inhabit a small, self-absorbed world of prolonged adolescence and artistic apprenticeship, observed now with the benefit of hindsight, and an indulgent memory.

1970 is an intimate look at a raw young life, expressed through the experience, learning, skills, and sometimes insights of thirty years later.