She Liked Short Lines

For her 1987 novel, Swann: A Mystery, which was reissued as simply Swann and as Mary Swann in foreign markets, Carol Shields composed several poems as representative works of her protagonist. Mary Swann is a poet from the countryside around Kingston, Ontario, who is murdered by her husband, at fifty, on the same day that she drops off her manuscript at a small publisher. The Peregrine Press — not one of “the simpering ‘little mag’ people, the offset people,” as Shields amusingly puts it — is run by the editor of a fictional Kingston newspaper, the Banner, one Frederic Cruzzi, along with his wife, Hildë, who is a Rilke specialist. The poems, which are rather good in an Emily Dickinson sort of way, get printed in an edition of 250 copies, most of which disappear (the usual fate of small-press books), making life challenging for the growing band of Swann scholars. When it seems that the entire edition has been lost or stolen, the text must be...