THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, SATU[RDAY]
SONGSTRESS OF SASKATCHEWAN
HILARIOUS SATIRE
SARAH BINKS. By Paul Hiebert. Oxford; 182 pages, $2.50.
REVIEWED BY W. G. CONRAD
There is always room in the book-stores for really humorous new books, and at this festive season of the year a few extra chuckles should be particularly appreciated by the reading public. The timely advent of Paul Hiebert's "Sarah Binks" is therefore somewhat of an occasion, not only because it is another contribution to a field that has been singularly neglected by Canadian authors but because it is genuinely funny.
Cleverly written by a man who is presently Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba and who for years has been delighting his students with informal readings from it, Mr. Hiebert's book is a hilarious but good-natured satire on the academic mind that tends to take
its literature too seriously. It purports to be the biography of the mythical Songstress of Saskatchewan, who as a sensitive product of the prairie, matured and died in the shadows of the four grain elevators which set the town of Willows apart from the surrounding plain.
Born with an ability which was only surpassed by her ambition, Sarah poured her thoughts out in poetry, and it is this verse which Professor Hiebert has undertaken to appreciate — with tongue in cheek — for the Canadian community. Although she never went farther afield than Regina, Sarah was equally adept at writing an "Ode to a Storm at Sea" as she was at philosophising on "Pigs", and the pinnacle of her career was apparently reached' in the epic poem "Up from the Magma and Back." Unfortunately, the full scope of her talents will probably never be known to anyone but Mr. Hiebert, since he contrived that she come to an untimely end by cracking the horse-thermometer while taking her own temperature and dying of mercury poisoning.
The author has not only supplied ample background for his subject by analysing the pattern of life on which Sarah drew for inspiration— and thereby revealing the inherent humor latent in a frontier community—but has included in his appreciation practically all the poems which Sarah is supposed to have produced. The resultant fund of burlesque prose and rib-tickling poesy is ample proof that all of Professor Hiebert's talents do not lie in the field of chemical science, and Sarah will be welcomed by Canadians everywhere as a source of hearty laughter for academicians and laymen alike.
