WHEN THE POET AND Verbal magician Gwendolyn Mac Ewen died at the age of 45 in 1987 the loss to Canadian literature was immeasurable. Bad politics perhaps to single out one writer and say that no matter who the reigning queen of poetry may be in this country it is Gwen MacEwen who will become an emblem and icon for young future poets looking for a model of fierce devotion to poetry and a life of spirit. Perhaps even more to the point, she will come to represent the struggle that is the life of a poet: to be the representative of real worlds, netherworlds, afterworlds, on this difficult and often uncomprehending daily planet.

Rosemary Sullivan has come to this biography with her heart and her agenda on her sleeve. She was haunted by the mystery of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Though she had known her for some years, it was only when MacEwen died that Sullivan realized how little she knew about Gwendolyn MacEwen's personal life. Part of Sullivan's approach to biography is to reveal her own personal journey as she writes. Sullivan is always alive and exploring within her text and this becomes one of the most compelling aspects of her book.

And what Sullivan found on this journey of exploration is a complex, amazing (in the old Anglo-Saxon sense of confusion and bewilderment) story of art, love, and life worthy of grand opera. Growing up in a disintegrating family, the young Wendy MacEwen watched, powerless, as her mother sank deeper into madness and her father fell apart in despair and succumbed to alcoholism. She would later write:

"Of all the various fears one can experience,

the earliest and possibly the

most devastating is the imponderable

agony of just being here."

Rosemary Sullivan documents this imponderable agony and offers many interesting insights and observations about MacEwen's early life without failing into the trap of playing psychiatrist or indulging in a fashionable prurient voyeurism. This ability to be fully involved, emotionally and intellectually, with her subject and yet to maintain balance in her analysis sets her apart from other Canadian biographers, Elspeth Cameron being an example, who tend to get mired own in their own obsessions, losing sight of their role as biographer illuminating a life.

The shadow-maker's life that Sullivan illuminates has poetry and mysticism at its dark centre with doomed marriages, exotic lovers, and intense friendships shimmering like a cloud of stars indicating her presence. A dark worm of alcoholism eats away at her life and it is that "invisible worm that flies in the night" that is her eventual destruction. Sullivan unravels the life of a courageous autodidact, a solitary celebrant, a woman of unstoppable imagination and faith in the power of poetry.

The occasional delightful surprise rewards the persistent reader. The imagination runs wild when one learns that Gwen MacEwen was frequently at the receiving end of Gleen Gould's deep-in-the night interminable phone calls. And Sullivan is equally adept at recreating an era when a group of Bohemian Embassy poets could create a furor and be arrested for reading poetry without a permit in a public park in Toronto. The good old days to be sure.

One of MacEwen's wonderful quilites as a person and as a writer was her irrepressible, bizarre and penetrating sense of humor. While Sullivan is just a bit earnest in her quest to convince us of MacEwen's sense of fun, she has had the inspired good sense to include many of MacEwens poems in the text of the book. MacEwen's remarkable honor and original vision are evident in many of the selections.

So often the focus in a biography is on "the life" of the writer, but what is forgotten is that the writer, the writing is the life. Sullivan never forgets this, neither did Gwendolyn MacEwen. In all many books of poetry, novels and scripts her devotion to the art of seeing and the life writing is evident and her genius still astounds. I am sure that her many books, such as A Breakfast For Barbarians, The Armies of the Moon, The shadow-maker, and her last, Afterworlds, will continue to hold and enthall readers in the variable future we will grow into.

And Gwen MacEwen will remain magical and visible in her own words:

The particles of light cast off from you hair

Illumine you for the moment only.

You afterimage claims the air

And every moment is Apocalypse-

Avater, deathless,

Anarchy.