In this her second book of poems, Patience Wheatley reflects upon her experience with the Canadian Women's Army Corps -- exploring her own coming-of-age and offering an historical testament to to the Canadian women who joined the Corps in World War II. The discipline of army drill "recalling crunching patterns / made by our feet on parade ground gravel / to sharp words of command" becomes in memory a time "when once we did it together and perfectly" -- an image of fulfillment both spiritual and sexual. A young girl's romanticism is later transformed, after marriage and children, to the "blessed revelation" that "love is / the predicate." Rich with sentiment, Wheatley's poems are never sentimental, but enlivened by honesty and wit.
A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley's first published collection of poetry, though her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Mamashee, Contemporary Verse II, Quarry, Origins, Grain, Northern Light and Event. She has also published a number of short stories, including the much-noted "Mr. Mackenzie King" in the anthology Fiddlehead Greens (;Oberon, 1979);. The forty-three poems of A Hinge of Spring are assured and confident in tone, and while their geographic locations are scattered there is little sense of the merely occasional. Wheatley's writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence in which literary associations and the response to immediate experience work together.
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