Showing posts with label Sherk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sherk. Show all posts

01 May 2015

May Day and the Promise of May



Verse for May Day by "Gay Page", Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk. Like last year's, this is drawn from The Workshops and Other Poems, her lone volume, published in 1919 by the Fort William Times-Journal.

A complex woman was Mrs Sherk. In Victoria's time, when women rarely advanced beyond the position of teacher, she became principal of Fort William's Ogden School. In 1907, she reinvented herself as a journalist, became one of the earliest members of Canadian Women's Press Club, and yet was a fervent anti-suffragist.


I'd not heard of Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk until two years ago when I rescued her book, a library discard, just as it was about to be tossed, stripped and pulped. It has since provided hours of enjoyment.

Well, an hour, anyway. It's a very slim book.

The poetess pairs her May Day poem, "May Day", with a photograph titled "The Promise of May".



Related post:

01 September 2014

Labour Day Verse for "All Good Workers"



The dedication in The Workshops and Other Poems, the only volume of verse by Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk (1857-1930), otherwise known as "Gay Page".  James Hardy Sherk (1887-1975), a lawyer, was the poet's only surviving child. 

from The Thunder Bay Historical Society: Eighth Annual Report (1917)
Related post:

01 May 2014

A Poem for May Day by Gay Page



Image and verse from The Workshops [sic] and Other Poems (Fort William, ON: Times-Journal, 1919) by Gay Page, otherwise known as Florence N. Horner Sherk. All, poet included, come from a not so distant past in which Ottawa saw Canadians as more than mere hewers of wood, drawers of water and bearers of bitumen. It was a time in which the labour of a single worker could "win bread for mother and child". 

Imagine.


Related post: