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In the mind of an artist who has thought about such matters carefully, there are two mirrors. One is the mirror Stendhal described as reflecting whatever occurs on a road. This is the mirror of mimetic realism. The second mirror is the one through which an artist may enter another, larger world. It is the mirror, for instance, of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, behind which there is, from the viewpoint of the empirically factual observer, a world of uncorrected optics where up is down, left is right, and a Tiger-lily speaks. Anne Simpson's poetry and prose contains both these mirrors.

The empirically factual one sometimes contains intimations of her own life. She was born, one of three sisters, in Toronto in 1956. She lived in Burlington, Ontario until she was seventeen. Her mother was a devoted high school art teacher, although she was gifted enough to become a professional painter. Simpson's father, a civil engineer, was employed by a large property-development company. She grew up in a house filled with books. Although his interests were wide, Simpson's father was most deeply interested in studying history. The house was also filled with music. One of the family's perennial games involved guessing the composers and titles of pieces of classical music played as anonymous on the record player.

Simpson obtained a B.A. from Queen's University in Kingston in 1977. She studied at the Ontario College of Art between 1978 and 1980. While there, Simpson visited Italy twice as part of her studies, each time for nearly eight months. Between 1981 and 1982, she completed a B.Ed. at Queen's, where she met her husband who was enrolled in graduate studies in English. Between 1982 and 1984, she and her husband worked for CUSO as English teachers in Christian and Muslim areas of Nigeria. Upon their return to Canada, she gradually completed a Master's degree in Canadian Literature at Queen's between 1984 and 1988, while also teaching literacy for a local school board. During this period, she began working with concentration as a writer. She took no creative writing courses but was strongly encouraged by the late Bronwen Wallace and attended a number of meetings of the writing circle which met at Wallace's home. In 1988, Simpson and her husband moved to Antigonish, where she founded and co-ordinateed the Writing Centre at St. Francis Xavier University.

Simpson has published two collections of poetry, Light Falls Through You (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2000) and Loop (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2003). The former won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. The latter was nominated for the Governor General's Award and, as I write, has just been awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. As well as a number of uncollected short stories, Simpson has also written a novel, Canterbury Beach (Penguin Viking, Toronto, 2001).

I began this brief introduction by trying to suggest the accuracy and complexity of Simpson's sense of the world's visual surfaces and of the multiple narratives which those surfaces simultaneously partially open and conceal, recover and displace. She has told me that as a child she wanted and expected to become a painter. Her intentions led to the Ontario College of Art, to Italy, and to her own serious work as a painter before she turned to writing poetry and fiction. Those intentions continue, I think, as inflections in both her poems and in Canterbury Beach. When she painted, Simpson created landscapes, large in size but frequently microscopic in focus, close-ups of grasses, of waters. The same kind of intense, close, disorientating focus appears in her poems and in memorable passages in her fiction.

Her poems often are voiced by an abstracted observer-speaker, looking askance at fragments of appearance and event. To a reader, these fragments seem to cry out for some kind of shelter in a morally comprehensible structure. With a few exceptions ("Now What" in Loop is one), the observer-speaker refuses to or cannot supply such a structure overtly. An amnesia of value spreads through the poem concerned as the spectacle of fragmented appearance is elaborated and approaches the reader more closely, like a parody of some late medieval or Renaissance processional triumph. The observer-speaker is not amoral, but she or he is driven by an ethical sense which cannot locate its source, is therefore unsure of its future and knows there is something deeply wrong with the random patterns of cause and effect which an aesthetic of appearance invariably presents. For this aesthetic offers a game (a frequent framing context in Simpson's poetry, which is echoed by the very forms of her poems, particularly in Loop) the rules of which are arbitrary, sometimes violent; and they are predictable only in retrospect. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, the observer-speaker in Simpson's poems has to cope with a world of telescopic or microscopic proportions. Unlike Alice, she or he is unlikely to wake up back in the middle ground of perspective, curled up with a kitten, in front of the fire. She or he may also not be Simpson herself.

In Canterbury Beach, the aesthetic of surfaces is experienced by one of the novel's main characters, Robin, unwittingly, before she puts away childish things. Robin remembers how, as a child, she once got lost when her mother took her shopping, how she found her way to a washroom and cried, at first, in despair:

In the three-way mirror, which was a gaudy, gold-edged splendour, the anguish in her face was exaggerated. She could see not one self, but hundreds, all standing one behind the other. She stopped crying. She moved her right hand and the thousand selves in identical blue-smocked dresses raised their right hands. She shook her head and her braids flipped up, as did thousands of other beribboned braids. She swayed gracefully from side to side and the selves swayed with her, a snake of girls. It struck her that she had enormous power, newly discovered magic. So little was required of her. The movement of her head, her hand. That was all.

"That was all" says both a little and a very great deal. The passage is full of irony. During the course of Canterbury Beach, Robin must learn to reflect upon a world behind the mirror which will include an adulterous and semi-incestuous husband (he sleeps with his sister-in-law, who commits suicide). She will also look after her father, a painter, at the end of his life, when diabetes and old age have limited the practice of his art to the making of collages from the fragments scissored out of magazines. At his insistence, they begin to construct a memory theatre, an architect's model based upon sixteenth century arts memoria devices which attempted to organize human knowledge of the cosmos into architectural form - the elements, the emotions, the planets, the angels - using inscriptions, statues, symbols, images and drawers filled with messages.

That memory theatre is a world of wonders. It is like a set of the boxes of Joseph Cornell, filled with discarded objects charged with some mysterious cognition of ourselves. Its significance is best described simply in the words of Verna, Robin's mother-in-law, when she says, "Dreams are like that. Sometimes I think we're all dreaming each other's dreams." Does Robin understand such things? All I can confirm here is that Canterbury Beach is itself a memory theatre, not a mirror of appearance, as it may at first reading seem, but the world behind that mirror.

So also are each of the finest of Simpson's poems. By no accident, they are usually serial, that is, architectural, in structure. They therefore resist their own tendencies towards visual fragmentation. Among them are the sixteen part "Altarpiece" and the ten part "Usual Devices" in Light Falls Through You; the twelve part, "The Trailer Park," the five part "The Imperial Asylum" and the corona of seven chain sonnets, "Seven Paintings by Breughel" in Loop. To intercept any of these sequences by what must be limited quotation is unjust. It disrupts the pattern of repetitive and cumulative motifs out of which Simpson's sequence poems, like a Sibelius symphony, are built. Here, however, for all that, is the eighth part of "The Trailer Park."

In the tent, the man kisses the woman.
Elbow, eyelash, ear. The symmetry
of details, things
that match. Breath: breath: breath:
lips to skin. Every kiss
an ellipse. How he loves her.

Each thing grips
space until it learns to curve. And space
clutches planets, stars,
teaching them

how to move. Hundreds of years ago
Galileo couldn't sleep. His crude telescope
magnified the white smudges:
Jupiter's moons. Unnamed, unnumbered.
And beyond,

all that happened
keeps happening: night's breath
unfolds into a woman holding a man
holding a woman.

Perhaps that poem is a more accurate summary of the gist of these introductory notes: in Simpson's work the distinctions between the fragment and the whole, between the lesser and the greater are illusory. As Robin's father puts it in Canterbury Beach, "The whole thing is beguiling, divine, endless."