RIP Elise Partridge, 1958-2015

We learned today from the Globe and Mail of the death of Elise Partridge. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, Partridge lived in Vancouver, BC for over 20 years, where she became a fixture in the Canadian poetry community. Her poetry dealt with her long battle with cancer, as Mark Medley writes at the Globe and Mail:

The spectre of illness hangs over The Exiles’ Gallery, the Vancouver writer Elise Partridge’s third collection of poetry, which will be published in April. It requires little more than a glance at the table of contents: Brief Lives, A Late Writer’s Desk, Anticancer Charm, Terminal, Exits Yet, reading the work itself, one is drawn to images of resistance: a moth caught in a spider’s web writhing “into revolutions till/ you can almost hear/ the hum as her sawdust-flake/ keeps the deathtrap/ shaking …” or a dying woman Partridge met in a cancer support group who “duelled to stay alive” until her daughter could be born. (“Some day we will tell her/ you refused to lie down,” Partridge writes.)

Medley goes on to write:

She was looking forward to the release of her new book, even making tentative plans to travel to Toronto. “Her last e-mail to me and [Anansi managing editor Kelly Joseph] was about wanting to come share a ‘magnum of Champagne’ over how happy she was [with] the cover,” Rogers says.

She leaves her husband, Stephen Partridge, a professor of medieval literature at UBC. In the poem Gifts, which appears near the end of the forthcoming collection and is dedicated to her partner, Partridge writes: …I leave/ nothing of enviable worth;/ no children; tureens of cracked/ china (an aunt’s)./ Why shouldn’t I drift off/ like a lost balloon?/ But you gave me another gift:/ "I’ll carry you in my heart/ till my last day on Earth.”

Head here to read and celebrate Partridge's poetry.