Julie Roorda is a discovery. She is one of the best young poets, of the modern generation, the group of thirty-year-olds, in whose hands we are provided with the gift of beauty and the poetic relevancy of life. We know now, with the publication of Eleventh Toe, her first collection of poems, that Ms. Roorda is in the vanguard of the overall Renaissance in Canadian poetry. Eleventh Toe, is a spiritualist conversation conducted with conscience, with ancestry, and with the spirit of man (and of woman); and which wrestles successfully, with the elemental questions of our contemporary morality, with warmth, with wonder, and with humour. Eleventh Toe poses religious and ordinary social questions that demand honesty through introspection, the kind of honesty that all good poetry must be obliged to encompass. Ms. Roorda is a laudatory, rich addition to our excellence in Canadian poetry. Austin Clarke.
