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Betsy Struthers, who now lives in Peterborough, Ontario, is a poet, novelist, critic and former head of the League of Canadian poets..
She is the author of seven books of poetry and three novels.
Her poetry has been praised for its narrative clarity, distinctive voice, and erotic play of language
Betsy received the Silver Medal as runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award in 1994 and was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award in 1993.
She has read her work from coast to coast in Canada, in Australia, and in North Carolina.
Her poems and fiction have been published in many anthologies and literary journals.
She has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction to students of all ages from kindergarten to adults
Betsy Struthers works as a freelance editor.
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 In Her Fifties
Struthers tells two stories in her latest book of poetry. The first, narrative portion of the book is the story of the 50s and the generation that lived through the Cold War and implacable authority of school.
The second tells the story of a woman in her fifties, best by memory and buoyed by sensory awareness of her world, the cottage at the lake, the garden, the ocean... "writing it down so the page wil remember for us when we forget."
Poetry, $18.95
ISBN 088753-402-3
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D riven
Driven, Betsy Struthers' fifth book of poetry, is about being “driven” from one place – physical and metaphorical – to another. It is a book about duality. In the first part of the book, Struthers writes about being in between generations, about her father’s death and her son’s coming of age, while she is caught in the middle of her own life story.
In the second part, Struthers writes about body and soul and searching for answers in runes and cards. The language in this new work – Struther’s fifth book of poetry – has a lyrical simplicity, but strikes an emotional chord that is poignant and touching.
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 Still
The poems in this collection from Betsy Struthers explore what it is to be living at the beginning of a new century in the middle of an ordinary life – that of a wife, a mother, a woman who works and travels, who reads and remembers.
There are several sonnets, usually unrhymed or internally rhymed, a glosa, a ghazal. There are poems that set their own form of line or stanza length and poems that do away with set form altogether.
There are series of poems that create a brief narrative; there are series that form snapshots of place and time. Images echo and re-echo through the pages. These lyrical poems, though not wholly autobiographical, spring from the experience of the writer--either from direct experience or things read, dreamt, or overheard.
In the end, the book comes back to love, to the fact that, still, we can be together: “Here where we are /most at home, we lay most bare/ clasped as tight as two hands clasp/ in promise, in praise, in prayer.”
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to my mother’s funeral: his heart
cannot stand it. And when the weight of her casket
settles in my right hand, as with siblings and cousins
I carry her out of the church to the hearse, he
raises a glass to the sun that just at that moment
sets roses in his garden on fire. When family gathers
back at his house, he welcomes those whose names
he no longer remembers-- great-nephews, great-nieces
seen only at Christmases. How long their legs in their
summer dresses! How deep the boys’ voices! Eat,
he keeps saying, eat, it’s a party.
She rests at long last, her hell of dementia over. But he is still here (in spite of her
predictions), throned in the blue velvet wing chair,
dog in his lap. Grandchildren like towers
surround him.
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