You will be riveted by the lyric voice of Hoda, the narrator of Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems. The collection, which is structured into three parts, plunges you into Hoda’s compelling story. She is a character that commands your attention. The first poem begins with Hoda’s mother’s death which leaves the young girl and her blind father at the mercy of an unscrupulous uncle. The poems are set in Winnipeg’s North End, the Jewish enclave, in the early part of the 20^th century. Hoda, the protagonist created by Adele Wiseman for her novel, Crackpot (1974), has “long occupied [the] mind,” of poet and academic Ruth Panofsky, whose earlier collections include Laike and Nahum (winner of a Canadian Jewish Book Award) and Lifeline.

In Radiant Shards, Panofsky, an esteemed scholar of Canadian women’s literature, gives voice to Hoda’s innermost feelings. We experience Hoda’s frustration and hurt when her obesity blinds others to her humanity. But for the young boys of the neighbourhood, Hoda’s body is a source of comfort and release. In the section titled, “INITIATION” Panofsky skilfully describes the pleasure, heartbreak and stigma of Hoda’s sexual encounters. Before even becoming a teenager, Hoda is branded the “resident whore.”

While created almost 50 years ago, Hoda is character who is deeply relevant in the 21^st century, where sex workers, immigrants and large-sized women, continue to face discrimination. But Hoda defies convention, using her ample body to support herself and her storytelling father, Danile. Despite the bitter taunts she weathers, and an unexpected pregnancy and the birth of her son which brings “crushing sadness” Hoda never loses her compassion. Panofsky writes the birth scene as a series of sharp, stabbing lines, many only a single word, making Hoda’s panic palpable. She acts quickly to shield her father from the truth and to deposit her son safely at the orphanage.

Panofsky’s decision to organize Radiant Shards according to the arc of Crackpot allows readers unfamiliar with the novel to experience Hoda’s journey and to sense the importance of the original story. Story itself is a key theme in the collection. Hoda has been raised on her Daddy’s mythic-like stories of the past and “the great miracle of her birth.” These stories sustain Hoda through dark times when she must make an impossible choice about her son, David. Panofsky’s language captures the anguish of a mother who cannot save her son, or herself, from pain and loss. In the end, Hoda must accept the consequences of her choices and the accompanying despair.

The other story, layered seamlessly into Radiant Shards, is that of poet Ruth Panofsky. Her admiration for Wiseman and her heroine sent Panofsky to Winnipeg to walk Hoda’s neighbourhood and to research Jewish life in the North End in the early 20^th century. Radiant Shards blends fiction, historical record, homage, and poetry. In her foreword, Panofsky reveals that “…my admiration for the loving and resilient Hoda…has only grown and deepened.” The more time I spend with Radiant Shards, the more I admired what Panofsky has accomplished. Poetry is always as much a challenge as a delight and giving voice to another writer’s character adds another layer of complexity.

Love finds Hoda in the end, in the person of Lazar, a Ukranian immigrant with his own painful past. A man who sees Hoda for who she is –  an intelligent, loving, woman, a fellow survivor who speaks truth. In the final set of poems, we hear the voice of a mature Hoda, who understands the manipulation that underpinned her sexualization and the stigma that was attached to it. But Radiant Shards shows that Hoda was much more than what others assumed: she was compassionate. An intrepid businesswoman. A woman who has come to accept herself and her life.

Woman’s bodies continue to be battlegrounds: abused, judged, and a source of lifelong angst. Fat women are particularly vulnerable to bullying and social discrimination. In the Coda of Radiant Shards, Panofsky writes Hoda’s “Homage to her Body.” It is equal parts blessing and curse, ending with grace and acceptance. Hoda’s story, as retold poetically by Ruth Panofsky, becomes a light-filled ode to seeing ourselves and others with clarity and forgiveness.