WADDINGTON, MIRIAM

WADDINGTON, MIRIAM (Dvorkin; 1917–2004), Canadian poet. Waddington was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She attended high school in Ottawa and earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1939. Subsequently, she earned an M.S.W. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, and an M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1940. She married the journalist Patrick Waddington in 1939 (from whom she was later divorced) and had two sons. In 1945, Waddington moved to Montreal, where she was employed as a social worker and participated in the city's literary life. She contributed poems to First Statement and Preview and published her first book of poems with First Statement Press. In 1960, she returned to Toronto, where she worked for North York Family Services. From 1964 until her retirement in 1983, Waddington was a professor of English at Toronto's York University. Waddington published 12 books of poetry. Her earliest collections (Green World, 1945; The Second Silence, 1955; The Season's Lovers, 1958. established her reputation as a lyricist. Waddington's poetry mines the historical past and individual memory. Her work is characterized by intensely visual images that evoke landscape and daily life. At the same time, her oeuvre reflects a lifelong engagement with social issues, which she attributed to her Jewish upbringing, particularly as they affect women. Throughout several decades, she experimented with form and language in poems that reveal – with increasing concision and gentle irony – the contradictory meanings of ordinary life (The Glass Trumpet, 1966; Say Yes, 1969; Dream Telescope, 1972; Driving Home, 1972). By celebrating small pleasures, her poems on aging (in The Price of Gold, 1976; Mister Never, 1978; The Visitants, 1981; The Last Landscape, 1992) subdue the pain of loneliness. Her Collected Poems was published in 1986, and an excerpt from one of her poems appears on the Bank of Canada $100 note. Waddington won the Montreal Jewish Public Library's J.I. Segal Foundation Award in 1972 and 1986. Waddington also published Summer at Lonely Beach and Other Stories (1982), a collection that draws on her childhood and youth in southern Manitoba, and Apartment Seven (1989), a volume of essays. She wrote A.M. Klein (1970), a pioneering critical study of the Canadian poet, and edited The Collected   Poems of A.M. Klein (1974), as well as John Sutherland: Essays, Controversies and Poems (1972). (Ruth Panofsky (2nd ed.)