On October 16th, Lee (Laryalee) Fraser passed away peacefully at Bastion Place at the age of 73.
In the seventies and eighties, Lee was a reporter and photographer for various newspapers throughout the area, including the Kamloops News and the Shuswap Market.
She then became a member of Chase Village Council for nine years,
including three years as mayor, 1993 to 1996.
She enjoyed volunteering for various causes, loved gardening, and for
several years she wrote poetry under the pen-name Laryalee Fraser. Her online friends know her as Lary. Click here to see her website, Along Poetry Creek.
In old Niagara town, long aisles of ancient trees
Stand sentinel along the storied ways,
Tall, sturdy patriarchs of other days,
Whose busy leaves are ever whispering memories.
And one there was who walked beneath their arching shade:
True, gallant type of Christian gentleman,
He, faithful, passed the full, allotted span
Within this hoary town whose cause his own he made;
And always at his side there moved a shadowy throng:
Simcoe and Brock and noble Addison,
All who with axe and plough and sword and gun,
Laid firm its deep foundations that have lasted long,
All who, sojourning in this place, did love it well.
He was like to the Roman Livy, he
Who loved his town and ever strove to be
Worthy its great traditions and its annals tell.
So let his country keep his memory one pure sheen,
And bring him, there beside the ivied wall,
Beneath still other forest-veterans tall,
French whites and English roses, ‘twined with Maple green.
Source: E.J. Pratt, (ed). Canadian Poetry Magazine. vol. 6, no. 1, December 1941.
Biographical information on George ‘Fisher’ Davidson prepared by historian Arden Phair:
George ‘Fisher’ Davidson was born in Batavia, NY, October 19, 1912, the son of George Lee Davidson and Florence Irene Fisher. The family left the United States on February 27, 1918 and settled in Grantham Township where they took up farming. Fisher’s father died in October 1926 and his brother in February 1929. By March 1929, Fisher and his mother are living in Welland. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1935, he returned to Welland where he was a teacher, remaining there until at least 1940. In 1947 he was in Hornepayne, Ontario, then is found in Toronto in 1948, residing there until at least 1961. In the 1950s, his employment in Toronto is listed as “customs.” Davidson apparently died in Hamilton, January 19, 1995, though no official record of the details of this event can as yet be located (either in Hamilton, Welland, or elsewhere).
George ‘Fisher Davidson, Class of ’35, University College Torontonensis
In high school, he was acknowledged as an accomplished orator, reaching the Ontario District semi-finals in 1929. Ten years later, he was playwright for “The Canal”, a production whose focus is on a Canal widow at the 1932 Official Opening of the waterway. Her story is told as she reflects upon the tragedies that led up to the day’s events. His original play was performed by members of the Anglican Young Peoples Association (A.Y.P.A.) of Trinity Anglican Church in Welland. In January 1939, the play was awarded The Lewis Cup as the best of six plays at the A.Y.P.A. Niagara District Drama Festival.
Davidson had poems and short stories published in a variety of journals and newspapers including the Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, Canadian Poetry Magazine, Canadian Forum, and The Globe/Globe & Mail. He was also a member of the Toronto branch of the Canadian Authors Association.
Fisher Davidson’s published works include: Two Sonnets for a Centenary (ca. 1939), Dominion and Other Poems: 1948), Principal Boy (1954), and Mists of Quebec (1960).
adelaide biography
Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn, New York. She was the third daughter of Episcopalian Rev. Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. She was an honours student at Vassar College, and then became a teacher. She contracted tuberculosis somewhere around 1903, and died on October 8, 1914.
She had been working on a study of metrics that proved too exhausting for her to continue after the onset of her illness, and so she concentrated on poetry. She is known as the inventor of the cinquain – a poem of 5 short lines of unequal length, of which Niagara is one. Her poems were published posthumously.
Closely related to the Japanese hokku is a little form invented by Adelaide Crapsey. She called it a cinquain. Verse published after her death contains twenty-eight poems in this pattern. They too are exquisite little atmosphere poems. They suggest, as do the Japanese poems, the feeling of things and circumstances. Absence of rhyme gives them the same elusive charm. The scheme is five iambic lines arranged one foot on the first line, two feet on the second, three on the third, four on the fourth and one on the fifth. Substitutions frequently vary the music.
As an expression of the frail inventor’s spirit, the cinquain form has special poignancy. Miss Crapsey was a victim of tuberculosis. She wrote most of the poetry which we have today at Saranac*. In fact she gathered her poems together as her memorial.
Her pattern inspired young versifiers. When their first experiments appeared in print a reader remarked that they irritated her. “They promise so much,” she complained, “touch the feelings and then leave one nowhere to think it all out for one’s self!” That is exactly what Japanese poetry and cinquains are intended to do: they “tease one out of thought’ as Keats says it.
About the Cinquain From: Wrinn, Mary J. J. The Hollow Reed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935
*Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, later the Trudeau Sanatorium, in Saranac Lake, New York.
Laura Secord. Image courtesy Niagara Falls Public Library
I search the pages of our history over
For a courageous one whose name would stand
For staunchest patriot, and for truest lover,
And prove the same by deed done for the land;
And my heart thrills, for ’tis a woman bears it,
You’ll find it, marble carved, on Laura Secord’s grave;
And you, and I, and every woman shares it,
The right to stand for what is good and brave.
Source: Kevin McCabe, ed. The Poetry of Old Niagara. St. Catharines,
Ont. : Blarney Stone Books, 1999.
Originally published in: Jean Blewett. Jean Blewett’s Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922.
“Looking for Niagara” is the title poem from a book (Slipstream, 1993) that celebrates the history of a natural Niagara. E.R. Baxter III is a recipient of a Just Buffalo Award, and a fellow of a New York State CAPS Award, both for fiction. In May 2000, the Buffalo Audubon Society presented him with the Harry Jay Kord Recognition Award for outstanding contributions to the causes of education and conservation in Western New York. He is a founding member of the Niagara Frontier Wildlife Habitat Council, and of the Niagara Heritage Partnership. Baxter died in 2024.
A book published in 2016 by Thames & Hudson, called The Art of Typewriting, features Baxter’s poem, The Brass Bed, on the facing page from Yoko Ono’s contribution. See an article about this poem
