George Elliott Clarke got it right when he wrote of Maxine’s poetry in The Daily News, “A refreshing change from the flat, disembodied voices that so often dull and deaden Canadian verse.”Maxine was born in Dartmouth in 1949 and grew up there. She contracted polio as a child and it was complications brought on by the disease that led to her death in 2011 at the age of 62. She attended Dalhousie University and went on to be a well-loved high school teacher for 31 years. She had a dramatic flair that kept her students on their toes. She used her acting ability to create dynamic public readings and performances and on the radio, as well as the studio where she recorded one of Atlantic Canada’s first spoken word albums (also titled Borrowed Beauty) in 1987.She produced three other collections of poetry along with that first offering, including Woman Talking Woman (1990), The Door of My Heart borrowed beauty(1993) and a children’s book of verse, Save the World For Me (1991)