Review of Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature, edited by Donna Coates and George Melnyk (Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press, 2010) 204 pp. paper

The editors contribute a joint Preface “The Struggle for an Alberta Literature”, with an “Introduction: Wrestling Impossibilities: Wild Words in Alberta”, by novelist Aritha van Herk.

The ten discrete academic papers, with end-notes and list of works cited, are from the October 2005 University of Calgary “Wild Words” conference on the occasion of the province’s centenary. Despite a fifty-year span of regional anthologies of Alberta literature and letters, this represents a preliminary study. “Acceptance of the concept of Alberta literature as a valid field of study remains an uphill struggle.” (p. x.) This fact is underscored by van Herk, who self-effacingly describes her own Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2001), as “my idiosyncratic and unreliable history of Alberta.” (p. 2) She explores Robert Krotesch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2001).

Part One Poetry includes essays on “The ‘Wild Body’ of Alberta Poetry”, by Douglas Barbour; “To Canada: Michael Gowda’s Unique Contribution to The Literary History of Alberta”, by Jars Balan; and “Pastoral Elegy, Memorial, Writing: Robert Kroetsch’s ‘Stone Hammer Poem’”, by Christian Riegel.

Part Two Drama includes essays on “No Cowpersons On This Range: The Cultural Complexity of Alberta Theatre”, by Anne Nothof and “Playing Alberta With Sharon Pollock”, by Sherrill Grace.

Part Three Fiction contains “‘Now Woman Is Natural’: The (Re)Production of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Suzette’s Mayr’s Moon Honey”, by Helen Hoy; “Wandering Home in Rudy Wiebe’s Sweeter Than All The World and Of This Earth”, by Malin Sigvardson; and “Richard Wagamese-An Ojibway in Alberta”, by Frances W. Kaye;

Part Four Non-Fiction has “From Grizzly Country to Grizzly Heart: The Grammar of Bear-Human Interactions In The Work of Andy Russell and Charlie Russell”, by Pamela Banting and “The Doomed Genre: Myrna Kostash and The Limits of Non-Fiction”, by Lisa Grekul.

The collection concludes with an “Afterword: Writing In Alberta-Up, Down, or Sideways?” by Fred Stenson. The author graduated from the University of Calgary, in 1972.  The Alberta Government sponsored the Search-for-an-Alberta-Novelist Competition. Social Credit had been defeated by Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives in 1971. Stenson outlines the milestones of our cultural history, concluding with this challenge, “Whether the tradition you choose is local, regional, national, continental,or global is up to you.” (p. 198)

Coates teaches Canadian and Australian literature in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.  With Sherrill Grace, she is coeditor of Canada and the Theatre of War: Eight Plays (2008). George Melnyk is Associate Professor, Canadian Studies and Film Studies, Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. He is the author of The Literary History of Alberta in two volumes (1998-99) and coeditor of The Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose (2003).

The collection contains list of biographical notes for the fourteen contributors

Anne Burke

Review of That Other Beauty, by Karen Enns (London, Ontario, Brick Books, 2010) 80 pp. paper $19.

There are forty-nine poems divided into three sections in this first collection.

In Part I, the poet approached a familiar field with new awareness of her surroundings. She associates the image of “hand” with fifteen metaphors, inspired by a line by Robert Bringhurst, in Sultra of the Heart.  Music and song will turn to dark and rags.  The “aftersense of hand” originates in a dream of a baby hawk.  She ponders “That Other Beauty” despite grief, anger, and censored ways.  A woman’s voice sounds like “winter bells”.  She keenly observes family members at a farmer’ market and participates.  Prior to the escape from last year’s field, house painter boards a bus.  Her attention to detail includes the constricted physical relationship. She ponders the meaning of death, based on the remains of a cat.  There are variations on the metaphor of death as hand, door, and towels. She regards herself as the stranger when she interacts with a woman from Nigeria, although the other knows nothing of the poet’s origins.  Home is what the hands are doing. Neighbours are invasive ghosts.  She expresses her feelings about leaving, admitting her realization that she is unloved and, therefore, cannot go back to her former life.  The snow has hands.

Part II we read her contemplations at McNab: the light is flat-handed, there are bird tracks in the snow, and she has feelings about losing her sense of belonging. She exchanges necessity for wanderlust in the mathematical grid of urban streets. Old homeless men feed the birds.  The city bench gives way to those of a train station, in Moscow, in 1929.  Expulsion and the dispossessed are compared with birds (raven, magpies, crows, gulls, sparrows) and willow canes. The martyrs emerge, devoid of luck. Others are reacting from bathing at Fort Elgin, in September, the conditions of vision defined by varieties of light. There is a no man’s land of a homeless person and her hesitation; a blaze of sunflowers and deluge of bird calls. The divine preacher is a performance artist. Her brother is another type of artist, because he prunes trees, similar to her “white words, facing out”. There is violence against a collage. Poverty is “hand to the lion’s mouth”.

Part III she expresses her nostalgia for another time of quiet and trust, peace and order, for instance, the Edenic gathering of cherry, pear, and strawberries. Time was “just out of reach” and place was “the distant line/still distant.”  There are herons, hummingbirds, and the hand which takes you to silence; before retreat, ritual matters, in half-light and afterlight; ripening and the last of the season.

Figurative language is employed in the alliterative assonance of “wheeze” and “wisteria”, “wind” and “whistling”; half-life and “lied” in an opening phrase, old words, personified “stars flower.”

The poet rejects the science of magnetism and physics, in favour of language-based knowledge, given its own limitations, as in “I have no language for” and therefore cannot comprehend the homeless man with his shopping cart, his “Every day a life”. The city of houses, street lights, weeds, trading orbits at Gordon Point, where trees are like death and their roots push through graves, geese, “grammar and grammar”, open-palmed.

The concluding poem relies on solitude, wind-blown, the totality of “Everything you can and cannot have is here....”

The poet is a classical pianist who grew up in a Mennonite farm community.  Her poetry appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, PRISM international, and The Malahat Review.

Anne Burke

Review of The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region, by Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010) 435 pp. paper $29.95 Indexed, Bibliography, black-and-white photographs throughout.

In the Introduction the editors outline the history of Western Canadian Studies Conferences at the University of Calgary, beginning with 1977 to 1990, from which fourteen volumes of papers were produced.

Sarah Carter edited The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and National Building in Western Canada to 1915; One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in Northern Wests was edited by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus. Carter, then a Master of Arts student at the University of Saskatchewan, first attended the 1977 ninth annual Western Canadian Studies conference held at the University of Calgary.  Women’s history first emerged in the 1976 volume of the eight conferences, with Sheilagh S. Jameson’s “Women in the Southern Alberta Ranch Community, 1881-1914.” Women presenters were relatively few, but they gained momentum. Patricia Roy of the University of Victoria appears to have led the way with her paper at the 1972 gathering on “The Oriental ‘Menace’ in British Columbia.” At the time of the 1984 conference, held at the University of Victoria, on “The Forgotten Majority: A Conference on Canadian Rural History”, papers were given by Eliane Leslau Silverman, Nancy M. Sheehan, and Cecilia Danysk. Susan Trofimenkoff was the only woman to edit a volume of conference papers. 

This is a title in six volumes of The West Unbound: Social and Cultural Studies Series based on papers presented at “The West and Beyond: Historians Past, Present, and Future”, a conference held at the University of Alberta, 19-21 June, 2008.

Part One, Frameworks for Western Canadian History, discusses critical history in western Canada1900-2000; vernacular currents in western Canadian historiography; and Cree Intellectual traditions in history.

Part Two, The Aboriginal West, examines photographic narratives of the Athabasca-Mackenzie River Basin; perceptions of insanity in B.C. Aboriginal populations; hauntings in Vancouver’s downtown eastside; identity and race politics in the Calgary Stampede.

In “Space, Temporality, History: Encountering Hauntings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside”, Amber Dean has been researching the number of women who have been disappearing, listed by the RCMP and Vancouver Police Department Task Force as missing and last seen from that neighbourhood. The Native Women’s Association of Canada estimates that there are at least 520 murdered or unaccounted for Indigenous women across the country, clustered mainly in the Western Provinces. In April 1861, police were ordered to drive all Indians found in town after 6 o’clock p.m. across the bridge that separated settler-Victoria from the Lekwammen (Songhees) reserve. They required passes from white persons by whom they were employed. There was a binary of otherness.

 In “The Expectations of a Queen”, Susan L. Joudrey discusses the Pocahontas Perplex, the Indian Princess-squaw dichotomy, or Madonna-whore duality, and Princess Wapiti. Beauty contests and pageants began as early as 1921. During the 1954 Queen of the Stampede contest, an aboriginal woman, sponsored by the Calgary Elks Lodge, entered the competition and sparked a controversy. When the news was published in The Albertan, correspondents supported her dressing as First Nations or Indian Princess, rather than as a Cowgirl. Nevertheless, she fulfilled her duties as the winner.

Part Three, The Workers’ West, studies labour and class formation in Prairie Canada; Two Wests; Epidemics, public health, and working class-resistance in Winnipeg, 1906-19; and the Winnipeg Postal Strike of 1919. In “Disease as Embodied Praxis: Epidemics, Public Health, and Working-Class Resistance in Winnipeg, 1906-19, Esyllt W. Jones advocates for Ada Muir, who discussed health in her “Woman’s Column” in The Voice, in relation to labour politics and activism. Her column was ended in 1912, after a series of heated exchanges.

Part Four, Viewing the West from the Margins, analyzes “Our Negro Citizens; A queer-eye view of the Prairies; and Human Rights Law and Sexual Discrimination in B.C. By the 1970s, the province “boasted” the country’s first rape crisis centre; the first feminist newspaper; the first national conference of human rights ministers; the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature; the only woman in the federal parliament in 1970; and one of the first women’s liberation groups in the country; and it was the first province to legislate against sex discrimination. Women from B.C. led the most visible protest against abortion laws in Canadian history, in 1969. They carried a caravan from Vancouver to Ottawa, containing a coffin to symbolize the deaths of women from backstreet abortions. The source is “I Believe in Human Rights”, by Clément (cited p. 316, note 15). The first Canadian study on sexual harassment appeared only in 1978. Doris Anderson provided a vivid discussion of the obstacles facing women, including senior executives, who wanted to have both children and to work, Anderson’s Rebel Daughter, a memoir, (cited p. 317, note 27.) 

In Part Five, we find Cultural Portrayals of the West, in W.L. Morton, Margaret Laurence and Manitoba; Banff photographic exchange; Eric Harvie and Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi; and the Conservation of Historic Places in Saskatchewan.

The influence of Morton on Laurence, by Robert Wardhaugh,in “W.L. Morton, Margaret Laurence, and the Writing of Manitoba”, reveals there are four dominant approaches to Prairie history: formal, functional, mythic, and postmodern. “Morton represented all four, it was his vision of mythic Prairie and Manitoba that influenced Laurence”, (cited p. 344, note 1, from R. Douglas Francis, in “Regionalism, W.L. Morton and the Writing of Western Canadian History, 1870-1885,”American Review of Canadian Studies, 31, No. 4 (Winter 2001): 569-88.

There is a list of biographical notes for the twenty Contributors

Anne Burke

Review of the art of breathing underwater, by Cathy Ford (Salt Spring Island, B.C.: Mother Tongue Publishing, 2010) 114 pp. paper $19.95.

This splendid book, much anticipated, nevertheless made its way to me, magically, on Christmas Eve. I use that term advisedly because I have shared in at least some of her life experiences, on an annual basis.

This practice culminates, as she explains in “Soul Shaping/Coast Ghosting (on Clayoquot Sound)”, in Eco Poetry: Women Poets On The Environment 2009 (edited by Magie Dominic (The Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, 2010, p. 23)

I would like to give to each of you, not a postcard poem or a long poem or a love poem or a poem for peace, which has been my secret tradition at these annual gatherings, but a blank postcard, worth a thousand words, or more, the back clean slate of which is for you to do with as you will….

There are glimpses as a roman à clef in long, sinuous, carefully crafted poems, of evolution and peaceful revolution, in which League and Caucus members abound, too numerous to mention here. Now you must read them for yourselves.

Ford was the President of the League of Canadian Poets and was one of the founding members of the Feminist Caucus of the LCP. She is also a member of the Writers Union of Canada, and PEN International. She worked as a community and arts activist committed to world peace and to improving the status of women, especially women artists in Canada and internationally. Her personal essays, poetic fictions, novel excerpts, prose and long poems have appeared in more than two-hundred magazines, journals, and anthologies. She worked as a creative writing teacher, editor, typesetter, and book designer.

This new full-length collection is augmented by photographs, “Crocus Ice” and “Water Tulip”, scans of work using natural forms, mostly flowers, to create new realities and relationships (www.photoscanography.com). Much as the poet manages language (whatever the colour) splintered, bifurcated, implicated, conspiratorial, anti-advertorial, accompanied by an introduction which is non-linear and semiotic, by Jane Munro, author of Point No Point (who alludes to meeting Cathy in Pat Lowther’s workshop the autumn of Lowther’s murder.) More of this later.

Ford has fourteen books of poetry and numerous chapbooks and folios published by blewointment press, Intermedia Press, Caitlin Press, Véhicule Press, Harbour Publishing and gynergy books. In addition, we “are all writing about angels”, from Angels & Sharks, or Looking for Robert, a chapbook from erosisarosepress press, 1993; The Pariah Dress, 1994; The Little Black Dress Series, 1995; Sexing The Angels, 1995; and Cunnilingus, 1997. She has also contributed, as editor, to nonfiction, Stats, Memos Memory, 1987 and Illegitimate Positions: Women and Language, 1987, with co-editor Susan McMaster.

The drowned poet is a motif in much Canadian poetry (witness: A.M. Klein’s “The Poet as Landscape”). Cathy credits Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “The Swimmer” and “Mermaid and Ikons” in The Shadowmaker (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, Ontario, 1969) as sources. There is the intergenerational “rivering” of menses “as if, walking, walking under water.” (p. 99)

This variation on theme is of particular interest, because, rather than dying, the poet opts to adapt to new environmental conditions by becoming amphibious; and in so doing, shoring up abilities she hardly knew she possessed: as mother, daughter; a child of the past and a parent; ending all wars to appreciate a troubled peace.

Throughout, we discover/uncover the breath pause, aspiration, respiration, as in: “It is sometimes hard to breathe, /to catch your breath” (p. 27) “I look down into the water of my life so far, just trying to breathe” (p. 32) Mid-breath absolution possible.

a newborn son, youngest longlost brother
you cannot mistake him
breathing underwater
you cannot tell him apart
(p. 68)

and:

here the ocean does not lock frozen
dam busting the gates
lakehead, rivermouth opening
here you could swim year round
catch your breath, breathing caught underwater
(p. 76)

westcoast rain is omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous. As she wrote, in “Soul Shaping/Coast Ghosting,”

nothing is quite as powerful as the west coast, the wet coast, the place where I know for sure my creative and spiritual landscape is irredeemably fused in the wildest predictable and unpredictable nature….(p. 35)

At first glance, the poems are positioned between nature and art, skin (our birthday suit) being the colour of language, while black is all the colours (and none). Women’s literature, like the reason for a women’s room at the Montreal Windsor railway station (my mother and I a child, she explains: “a place not bothered by men.”) Not that she or we dislike men in general, but we have, and are, special women friends; survivors (barely) of patriarchy, never victims for long, for empathy fuses a strength and resiliency born of necessity and re-birthed by compassion.

In “Soul Shaping/Coast Ghosting,” she has moved from unique personal poetry toward a more common fictional good, produced by and despite “health issues, marriages, divorces, near-deaths, death wishes, birth, births, being reborn, death a blessing if nothing else, love, grief, what we thought in our family we would never say….” (p. 24) because we have established elsewhere the extended and alternate cherished family, inspired by the act of being unconditionally accepted.

There is a binary of sorts, in the first eight poems, linking options by “and”, “or”, the penultimate “if”, and finally “is” the state of being, much like the beribboned postcard poems which Cathy has with, inordinate generosity of spirit, distributed at our League annual general meetings and Feminist Caucus/ Living Archives Committee meetings, somewhere (anywhere) across Canada.

In Section One “women and children first”, which, appears, at first, as an attempt to rearrange the deck chairs on the ill-fated Titanic, by suggesting a classless society based on the response of a survivor, from Titanic Disaster Hearings, The Official Transcripts, edited with an introduction by Tom Kuntz, Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1998). There are also the allusions to novels: Faye Kellerman’s the quality of mercy and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and The Waves. The chairs are actually ourselves, as passengers or shore birds. There are flowers of a metaphoric garden, daffodils, narcissus, iris eyes. In the elegiac “A Small Poem for Peace” on the anniversary of Holly Jones’ death, she juxtaposes the bilingual refrain of a broken heart, with writing against death, her muse the white goddess, at “grave’s end.” (Robert Graves). (p. 16)

The composition of miscarriage and Montreal lilies was written while waiting for the metro (“Whatever the Colour”). There is the syncopative “smell of ripened oranges among the ashen, cracked stones” (to acknowledge suffering and to give ease, “The Blue Kosovo Angel”, p. 21) the grief of a woman for her deceased husband, he once was “a cool drink of water” (for her aunt and her cousin, “Beauty, or imagining the truth”, p. 23).

From “some, to one, to more than the sun, to none” a dedicated catalogue of the “Emilys” (“despite all the worries calling all the world, Emily, Emily, Emily despite death”, in “Soul Shaping/Coast Ghosting”) to “F”, “G”, and “Vs” (I) (“wallpaper, or forced perspective, once altered your name here”, April, May, June, 2010, p. 25). A “needle and thread, this coast drawing through” alludes to recycled paper, permanent print, an anatomy of a book, grass cloth, laser printed or tree free, to inform belles lettres (p. 70).

a woman as the singular deer, her heart pierced
the violence should be expunged but it seeps into

the hidden madness, two children dragged
after, the red mattress, the bloody hammer
all these should be removed
from poems
it is astonishing what survives after
what kills you
(p. 27)

Recent sociological studies pertaining to women’s studies and criminology are: Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies, by Walter S. DeKeseredy (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Fleeing the House of Horrors: Women Who Have Left Abusive Partners, by Aysan Sev’er (University of Toronto Press, 2002). In Canada, every six days, a woman dies from domestic violence. Between 1995 and 2004, domestic homicides accounted for one-third of the 4,502 solved murders in Canada. Of these, 47 percent were spousal homicides, and four out of five involved a current or former husband against his wife.

The muse and the poet are “like daughter, sister, sister in law, daughter in law, cousin, auntie, mother, grandma.” From “ii) if a tree falls” is a questionnaire, conditional on “if a tree falls” “if a lightning struck tree falls” “if a tree, candling, falls” and “if a shrieking widowmaker, tree, snag, falls” (p. 29) punning on a culturally modified tree falls; “if an oldgrowth tree falls”. The conjunction “but” invokes, “Listen, listen.” for Christine Lowther and the New Year.

Part iii) her 75th birthday year, is again for Pat Lowther, after “On Having Received An Open Invitation”, with thanks to journalist and poet Donna Sturmanis, for the seriousness of the proposition, a gift, “like all these women met” why must it be politically incorrect, inviting other women, into our lives; “of course, never copied out or written down, our worst fears, and not quite, going on/not at all, the same.” (p. 35)

In Section Two, “Stillwater, Spillgate”, about landscape kimonos, at a museum show, entitled “Homage to Nature: Landscape Kimonas by Master Itchiku Kubota,” she has taken the names and woven them into the forty-five parts of this long poem, as a celebration of both nature and art, and the denigration of nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lessons to be imparted include, but are not limited to, you are not what you see, and vision is limited; about aboriginal women with children, the truth and untruth in reporting. There are metaphysics, tideswept, lake enveloped into river, river into ocean, the voyage out, fish choked.

Section three “lifelines, or the little black dress poems” depicts writing about angels, in an idyll about a knife man, a surgeon: for vagina, cervix, uterus, penis, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. There are the peregrinations of angels, morphing into birds of prey, transformations which are not idle work. This is an iconography of the mockingbird dress, and the song, the dress I was wearing when I dreamt of your next best face red shoes, a dance of death, the pariah dress, stunned into silence.

From 1984 to 1986 Cathy Ford was a member of a national task force of Women and Words, working to create a draft constitution for a Canadian association of Women and Words. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Literary Storefront from 1980 to 1982. For more information about this organization, you can consult www.abcbookworld.com/viewessay, “The Literary Storefront: A Brief History“, by Mona Fertig, publisher at www.mothertonguepublishing.com It was the birthplace of The Federation of B.C. Writers. Cathy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with Honours. She is married with one son.

Anne Burke

Review of Two O’Clock Creek, Poems New and Selected by Bruce Hunter (Fernie, B.C.: Oolichan Books, 2010) 204 pp. paper $18.95

When I interviewed Bruce Hunter for The Prairie Journal (Number 32) 1999, his Country Music Country had just been published and he was immersed in writing his novel.

It’s about a little boy and he is obsessed with the sea, the antediluvian sea, and the one that’s eight hundred miles from here. And part of that is, because, if you are deaf, you live…not unlike the sea and so it’s part of his worldview, his…but that’s interesting…I pity anybody who understands my fiction…my first book of poetry, it’s all there. Everything that I’m into (“Lunch at the Lido Cafe: An Interview with Bruce Hunter”, p. 40).

The New and Selected Poems are arranged into sections, twenty poems from “Benchmark”; twenty-nine poems from “The Thorn Garden”; seven poems from “Seasons of the City”; fifteen poems from “Letters Home”; twelve poems from “Coming Home From Home.”

Hunter is the author of a novel, In The Bear’s House 2009; Coming Home From Home, poetry (2000); Country Music Country, stories (1996); The Beekeeper’s Daughter, poetry (1986); Benchmark, poetry, (1982); and Selected Canadian Rifles, poetry, 1981.

I reviewed Benchmark (Thistledown Press) in The Prairie Journal Number 3 (Fall-Winter 1984-85). That book “is a starting point. A prairie poet is an explorer, one who determines size, shapes, ownership and boundaries. (p. 36) As Hunter once wrote in “A Letter Halfway”, i say, where else/can the prairie boy go/but from one sea/to another deeper blue.” (p. 37)

Hunter has worked in blue-collar jobs for nearly fifteen years, as a labourer, Zamboni driver, and gardener, so that a critic is tempted to read his creative work as work poems or poems about these workplace(s), including white-collar teacher and author.  However, that would be a limited approach to the multi-level imagery and symbolic framework he employs.

The mystical wind celebrated by W.O. Mitchell appears in “But The Wind”.  Prairie rattlesnakes are part of the iconography, in this instance, a Pincher Creek horse in the chuck wagon races of the Calgary Stampede. A city boy appears in Paradise Valley, where he stumbles and must be rescued. He exposes the socioeconomic factors of crime (“Towards A Definition Of Pornography”). The word is framed by “brows bent in question marks”. (“Idiot Leaves”, p. 42) T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” is reworked in “rage”; the human body is a shift shaper: “our potbellies glowing hubcaps/on the wheels of the body.” (p. 46)

His experience with manual labour transforms the actions of journeymen into the divine (“Skyhooks’). Similarly, as a gardener for gravestones, he feels like the first or primal gardener (“Song For The Quarrymen”). The setting of Andrew Marvell’s postlapsarian poem “The Garden” contains the mythical scythe of time for gravediggers (“The Mower”) and all is past (“The Thorn Garden”). The Keatsian “Ode on a Grecian Urn” becomes transposed as “Hawk On A Shrouded Urn”; the metaphysical maggot or worm (“The Worm”). The poet recounts the eulogy for “The Funeral” and his sympathy for “The Young Widow”. 

In “Selected Canadian Rifles”, Hunter recalls Nanaimo 1858 and 1913; Winnipeg 1919; Regina 1935, Pearl Harbour 1941; Montreal 1970, and Ipperwash 1995. As landscaper he recounts “The Day We Tore Up Stanley’s Lawn” and the Keegstra trial, “What happened here/happens in every small town. / Some born, some died, most/moved away.” (“Mediation On The Improbable History Of A Small Town”, p. 105)

In the second section “Seasons Of The City”, the poet moves from the small town landscape to an urban setting, where tattoo parlours and bikers abide (“My Street”, p. 111); where both the malnourished and the fiscal conservatives live. (“Seasons Of The City”, p. 113)  There is work in the city cemetery, where a gardener befriends urban wildlife such as birds.

In the third section “Letters Home”, he aches for the country, while in Montreal, the Kensington Market; in the Mars diner, on Tyndell Avenue, his romances in Italian, or the Mediterranean,

In “Coming Home From Home”, the final section, Cree song, Crow speech, Pinto Lake, tinnitus or deafness, (“Sources”), small defiant women (“The Scottish Grandmothers”) comes full circle from the opening “Strong Women”.

In The title poem “Two O’Clock Creek” a long poem, the poet ponders the irony of a supposed creek without any water anywhere. His twelve-year-old persona is of “a prairie boy baffled by the magic of water” (p. 187); he replaces the school maps in his head with the reality of climbing, glaciers as the source, and the Kootenay Plains. This poem, which inspired Hunter’s novel In the Bear’s House, winner of the 2009 Canadian Rockies Award at the Banff Mountain Festival, has been called a “seed” poem.

Robert Kroetsch wrote Seed Catalogue, in which he asked, “How do you grow a poet?”

This was the revolutionary question that Kroetsch asked…That question turned Western Canadian poetry on its head. It dug so deep into the prairie subconscious, into the archetypes of the region’s agrarian persona and pioneer mythology that opened up the eyes of a generation of writers who had yet to see the earth beneath their feed.

As Kroetsch points out

I had written The Ledger (1975) and was in the Glenbow Museum researching my novel Badlands, when I came across a 1917 MacKenzie seed catalogue…I realized that this was our shared text, so I wrote the poem. Robert Lecker termed it a new poetic form. It inaugurated a fascination in the West with the long poem and the potential of ordinary prose and everyday speech as legitimate tools of poetic text.  He helped to nurture a whole generation of aspiring  Saskatchewan writers, both novelists and poets, some of whom went on to national reputations.

(By George Melnyk, “Welcome Home, Bob: A Profile of Robert Kroetsch”, WestWord Magazine of the Writers Guild of Alberta, volume 31, Number 1, January/February., 2011, p. 7)

Hunter is the author of three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a novel In The Bear’s House. He studied with W.O. Mitchell at the Banff School of Fine Arts and attended York University. He taught English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College and Creative Writing at the Banff Centre and York University. He was the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Writer in Residence and the Richmond Hill Public Library.

In a poem dedicated to fellow poet Andrew Wreggett, he laments the lack of a magnetic field, no True North of the Heart. (“December Arson In Cabbagetown”, p. 115). He extols “What My Students Teach Me”, because a teacher must learn from the stories.

In “Death Of The Black Cat”, a long poem, an animal gendered as masculine expires from a heart murmur (like the poet who was only misdiagnosed with a heart condition). The couple grieves because they are childless.

Hunter ponders “How home is a dubious name/for what the heart can’t have—“, in “Coming Home From Home”, about Riel and Macdonald, based on a letter from the poet’s great-great grandfather. (p. 184)

About mid-way in our interview, the topic of sea imagery on the prairies was raised.  Hunter responded,

[T]hat’s something that has preoccupied me always. I mean it comes from growing up where there wasn’t much water.

He continues,

Six miles below us, right now, the antediluvian sea, it’s an ancient seabed and that kind of primeval soup, petroleum soup, is Alberta’s prairie and I was always aware of that because…so that you were always aware prehistory.

 I’ve always been aware of it and certainly the grassland, which is as vast as any sea. And it’s interesting, because of the western image and, at the same time as my novel. (pp. 39-40)

According to Donna Coates and George Melnyk in their “Preface: “The Struggle For An Alberta Literature”, Wild Words: Essays On Alberta Literature (Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press, 2010),

Because the study of Alberta writing is not a regular feature of academe, though Alberta writers are studied in other contexts and under different rubrics, acceptance of the concept of Alberta literature as a valid field of study remains an uphill struggle. The weight of historical prejudice and conventional negativity toward provincial identity in literature is a significant barrier. So the concept of Alberta literature remains contested by other boundary concepts and becomes a work in progress. (pp. ix-x).

The same statement was made about Canadian Literature in the early 1970s, because British and American Literature predominated. Yet, inevitability was implicit then and is a factor now, in all that we write and publish: Freedom to Achieve and Spirit to Create.

Anne Burke

Review of Falling Season , by Beth Kope (Lantzville, B.C.: Leaf Press, 2010) 68 pp. paper.

The “Postscript” deals with the form of dementia which encompassed hallucinations and paranoia in her mother’s case of Lewy Body. The documentary element in “From My Notes on Lewy Body” challenges the academic or medical discourse of symptoms, prognosis, treatment, with the anger, fear, and depression of the real, utterly shattering human impact. Scansion breaks up a linear reading with sprawling, wrap around poetic line, as “this is an evil disease”. (p. 33)

After her death, Kope says she discovered a black and white photograph of her mother. The facial portrait has been added “Lois Elaine, 1949” as an insert but affixed to a blank page, before the poetry texts. This serves to allow the reader to share in the experience, “she was looking down, but aware of the camera, softly smiling, showing her romantic spirit, and I recognized this girl, not having seen her before. I do.” The poet indicates in her “Postscript” the ultimate in “Unrestrained anger. Unrestrained love.” (p. 67) In the biographical note “About the Author”, we learn that Kope collaborated on a play based on Falling Season. “Wherever she has gone, she has found a lake to swim in.” (p. 68)

Since the manuscript was based on the narrative of her mother’s illness and the symptoms were described as fluid, fluctuating from day to day, “What tripped me?” is a latticework of language. There are companion poems, “Uncharted I, II, “; “Escape Route I, II”; “This House of Remnants I, II”. The focus point is uncertain, without proper coordinates. Memory lost, her body drawn to the river and/or “Rocks fill her mouth”. (p. 12) No I.D. (“Identity Theft”) The Daily Word is a hapless prayer. A woman unraveled. (p. 50)

The poet makes much of the stream of consciousness (or sub-consciousness) either imagined or documented throughout the collection. In “wordstream”, the typography of an exchange of conversation appears in bold font to indicate the lucid, placating tone of the caregiver, in contrast with the chaotic, even incoherent discourse of the patient. (p. 51) The breath pause rules with incremental repetition. (“In Your Tongue, Mother”) Both “It Comes to This” and “What Colour Uncertainty?” depict the dissolution of a personality, a human being, whether of the patient or her daughter through observation.

“What tripped me?” is the opening and the rejoinder or half-reply reads “No,/ your/ eyes.” The centre cannot hold with discordant and disconnected phrases. “Rear View Religion” groups one, two, and three poetic lines, set off by underscores between them. “Otherworld” is centre-justified and is replete with water imagery to indicate the depths of “a woman drowning”, she appears as a silver fish, covered in scales, which needs to be baited and caught, and the speaker regrets “the water’s / curtain between [us]”. (p. 52)

The childlike boogie man reappears in the patient’s bedroom. He can be blamed for missing or mislaid items. (“That Little Man”) More is “Lost” with a capital letter. Sibling rivalry is stoked. Communication reduced to telephoning. (“Mothering”, p. 15) Roots are torn up amid rampant destruction. (“Falling Season”, p. 16) Naming fails and there is a family history of this medical condition. (“In the Moments We Know”) The persona of the poet realizes “I can’t fix this”, the more so “me, standing helpless, knowing / no rescue.” (p. 17) “Spirit-catcher”, a poem by Erin Mouré, is a prompt for “Unravelling”, truly “Sometimes a word is too small / to hold all e ask of it.” (p. 20) Weeds are personified as holding “tightly / so tightly” (unlike the forest of trees uprooted). However, the comparison is made with her own tension, release is only possible “when my fists unclench”. (p. 20)

In better times, mornings are “tenuous”, demonstrating her domestic skills. (“Mummy Builds Her Dream Home”, p. 21) “Black onyx known / to absorb grief.” (“Ring Finger”, p. 24) A sister’s memory contradicts, “But / there is no proof”. (“Allow to Be Unresolved”, p. 23) An adopted child feels unloved and overburdened. (“Chosen”) A failed marriage and petty family grievances arise. (“Past Imperfect”) Dented furniture represents emotional damage. (“Coffee Table”) An epistolary apology (“Relics”) A poem by Carolyn Forché inspires “The House Saw Everything”, an original response to “dismantling”. (p. 30) The doctor in a dementia hospital ward argues for the new reality. (“Hot Dinners”) Adults reduced to children (“The Men Who Feed Their Wives”) The poet uses the progressive tense of verbs to indicate ongoing, frenetic activity. (“Family Meeting for Lois at Lynwood”) “Flutter” portrays how off-balance “hearts falter”. (p. 36) Indeed, “Watching this disease lynch her– / criminal”. (“My Mother Doesn’t Wear Green”, p. 37) A work-centred poem exposes a fictional or factual Alberta Hospital. (“It Was a Lovely Weekend Away”) The persona of the poet reverberates with false hopes: “Fix. Even pretend to fix” (p. 39)

The symptoms of “sundowning, (a syndrome in which Alzheimer’s patients experience confusion and agitation when the sun goes down”), ritual/ gathering, paranoia, and delusions” (“Hot Dinners”, p. 31) are all readily apparent in “Days Go By ? My Mother Said:” a transcription of utterances and random thoughts which spans five pages. Each section offers a different and disparate layout of text or scansion to reinforce the mental symptoms and poignancy of this predicament for both the patient and her family member.

The persona of the poet stands outside her own realm, in order to better portray the emotional wretchedness of her mother, and, by extension, her own ethical and moral challenges. Indeed, the poem “All About Loss. And Nothing Else” contemplates painted self-portraits, “edgy”, and how “Your gallery fills” now “with grim diluted forms.” (p. 46) “Shuffle” is a poem with text crowded at the very bottom of the page about a “Counterfeit mom” who shrinks into veritable oblivion. (p. 47) The title suggests the movement with short sliding steps, without or barely lifting the feet.” There is also a random order, and the ability to act in a shifty or deceitful manner; equivocate. Note: that “mom down hallway sees daughter and returns” a bit of a cheat, misbehaving but caught in the act.

Language has its failures and limitations. “Word wither”; “Word has fled”; even “evaporate”. The metaphysical conceit of “Memory is breath” is combined with “Words are breath on glass”, hence “breath has left no track” and “words no imprint”. (p. 48) A “To Do List” adds “Plum and Poems”, in part, to do with a recipe card, with the mother’s writing being indecipherable and hence “infuriating” to the daughter. (p. 55) The poet reflects on the woman “and all her lists” which continue to unravel. (p. 56) Collective memories are mixed with whole songs, even “flawless prayers” (“Redemption”, p. 58) A Hunter’s moon, a tattoo is branding, in a surrealist dreamlike state.(“Finland”) “This green Alberta lake” prompts a profusion of tactile memories. (“Water Wings”) The word “glide” is extended through motivated duplication of the vowel “i”. (p. 60) “Dress” and “Undress” are companion poems, revealing “she was what she once wore” (p. 64) about the act of cleaning her mother’s closet after her death. Then the daughter surveys her own closet, “That despair is the sheer raw blouse/ I wore all day yesterday.” (p. 65)

Anne Burke

Review of Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, by Myrna Kostash (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2010) 352 pp. paper $34.95. Map, bibliography, Indexed.

After her successful All of Baba’s Children, Kostash was asked to write a sequel.  Subsequently, she produced Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation and Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe. 

In Part One “Demetrius among the Slavs,” Kostash recollects her nine-year-old self in an Edmonton grade-four class, in the mid-1950s.  She senses cultural shame about being a Ukrainian and declares that she is Greek, among the English.  By the age of fifteen she has become an atheist.  She later confirms her Greek origins.

In “Byzantium on the Prairies”, at St. Peter’s Abby, near Muenster, Saskatchewan, in the summer of 2000, she meditates on Demetrius of Thessalonica who was martyred in 304 for preaching Christianity.  His contemporary namesake has become a Roman Catholic priest.  In order to pursue her “Demetrius” project, she visits Crete, Athens, Thessalonica and Sparta; then Serbia, and learns about Bulgarian history, before circling back to Edmonton in “Return to Canada”.

In Part Two “Demetrius in Byzantium”, she exudes Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appele Valley, while struggling to know herself, in a private-made-public confession.  She uncovers another Demetrius of Sirmium. The Slaves overcame the Balkans in the sixteenth century, and Kostash explores Byzantine emperors, the Coptic alphabet and translation of early Christian texts, at the Archives, discovering artifacts, icons, and monasteries, in 1083. The slaughter of the Turks is situated in the context of political anthropology.  The Saint helps all those in need, “even atheists and Communists in their disbelief.” (p. 239). She records the Two Versions of “The Life and Death of St. Demetrius, a Young Man of Thessalonica.” 

The luxurious full-colour cover image is of an icon, St. Demetrius, Tempera on pinewood, from the Russian Museum, in St. Petersburg.

In the Epilogue, she returns to Edmonton, on November 2, 2002, the Saturday before the Feast of St. Demetrius.

And the tongue is a fire, St. James wrote.  It once sent me out into the world.  Now I look around and see it burn without a flicker in the red lamp hanging on its gold chain before the Royal Doors.  It burns in olive oil and it never goes out. (p. 276)

The elaborate and extensive “Bibliography and Recommended Reading” not only authenticates the author’s scholarship but contributes a major work, in and of itself.

Kostash works her extensive bibliography into the academic texts, (for example, she quotes a poem by Bernadette Wagner on Demeter); but her first-hand impressions overcome exposition and truly capture informal interviews with an assembly of relevant characters.  Throughout she engages the reader in this evolutionary and epic quest. 

Kostash reveals that the book took a decade to write and, among the many acknowledgements, she mentions her University of Alberta Residency which made possible some of her secondary research. 

Earlier versions of Prodigal Daughter have appeared in AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003); Listening with the Ear of the Heart: Writers at St. Peter’s (Muenster, SK: St. Peter’s Press, 2003); Desire: Women Write About Wanting (Berkeley, Ca.: Seal Press, 2007); and Locating the Pas t/ Discovering the Present: Perspectives on Religion, Culture, and Marginality (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2010).  There were CBC Radio’s Ideas programming of Pursuing Demetrius (2001) and Six Things You Need to Know About Byzantium (2007).

Anne Burke

Reviews of Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, by Jeff Latosik (London, Ontario: Insomniac Press, 2010) paper $11.95 & Why Are You So Long and Sweet?: Collected Poems of David W. McFadden, “Introduction” and edited by Stuart Ross (London, Ontario: Insomniac Press, 2010) paper $19.95.

For a first book, “No refunds” are herein requested or received. Movie images are ribbonned throughout this collection: Freddy Krueger, the plotlines, (“Tiny Theatres”); stories in demo home theatres, and old B movies. There are organic images, of vines adapted to subways and vascular leaves, flower petals, and even a cactus. Mountains look like Braille. The poet compares 27 bones with 27 billboards. There are a few dead branches. People are dolphins like goldfish or sharks. In friendship lies electricity. So, too: song and space exploration; the history of fire; toys. Tomorrow is like a valid point, a rumour of gold, Cockroaches and silverfish, centipedes.

Youths appear in parks, with textbooks; on a camping trip, and in school health classes. They enter onto the landscape, swimming on a school trips, or returning in ambulances.

An underlying pattern presents itself. Pieces of buildings “divorce each other many times”, like an estranged couple. Self-improvement matters. Cars come and go.

Note the incremental repetition of “A theory goes/floats” (“How the Tiktaalik Came onto Land”)

This combines with a sense of abandonment, because “here are your keys”. The newer models, not yet conceived, have no errors reported. (“Collapsible Range”) A police car idles.

Two other poems preoccupied with vehicles deal with the fake/real dichotomy (“The Rise and Fall of the Station Wagon”) and imagining the hypothetical:

all the doors you abandoned in scrap yards
wobbled into their original hinges.
As if misfortune drove a 1956 Buick convertible

into a wall of its misfortune

(“Misfortune Drove a 1956 Buick Convertible”, p. 56)

Latosik won the P.K. Page Founders Award from The Malahat Review, in 2007, placed first in THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, in 2008, and was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, for 2008. He reaches at Humber College in Toronto.

Latosik points out that his poem “I’ll Climb the Tree If You Climb the Tree”, originally a centero, was inspired by a poem by Dave McFadden “that I can no longer find.” (p. 77).

According to Ross, this book is a companion volume to Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. Fadden (Insomniac Press, 2007).  Four long poems were collected in the earlier book which was shortlisted for the 2008 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize in 2008.  As such, it does not compare revised texts but does contain a newly discovered poem and a never-before-collected poem from 1961. The edition contains a Bibliography.

The introductory work “The Poem Poem” is a long poem, autonomic writing, and a pastiche of observations (compiled from December 28, 1966 to February 20, 1967.) Coleridge claimed that long poems have some parts which are more poetic than others. McFadden enjoys

Coleridge’s shameful lusting
fat little man chasing around
after travel books.
................................................
A picture of my poem
chasing after a hundred Coleridges.

(p. 43)

McFadden takes this on, the locus of his poetics in Hemingway, Browning, and Poe. The persona of the poet is of a being who can claim an affair resulting in “my pregnancy” because “’Fools have big wombs’” according to William Carlos Williams.

He makes full use of the page, text as well as pause, scanning/spamming/spanning spaces.

My body.    The absolute poem
is flesh.     Soon I’ll be
silent.

(p. 47)

The second section “The Ova Yogas”, another bi-or-transgendered approach is subtitled, “Being a series of poems/written in one long/strange afternoon.” (p. 49) In rhythmic beats per line and angles, the human stones of Easter Island are transmuted to “My personal Grand Canyon”, while elsewhere inserting snippets of phonetically-correct language or dispensing altogether with vowels.

The third section “The Poet’s Progress” is a contemporary take on classical models, for instance, Juvenal, and his Tenth Satire, On the Vanity of Human Wishes, and John Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, with allusions to R.H. Blyth and Eugen Herrigel and dedicated to “the poets of the 21st century/and the women at No. 9.” Beginning with the maxim “You can’t go home again”, the method is both inclusive and collective, with reference to the weekend crossword puzzle, and contemplations on the function of the poet:

and the paper is as white
as a window into heaven

(p. 71)

The poet is a token
of the world’s magic

(p. 72)

Inspiration occurs when

the lips part and another line pops out

(p. 75)

because composition is effortless and seemingly endless. He acknowledges arrogance but defends himself as unable to understand the cosmos, a common condition among us.

His playing solitaire is reminiscent of “On Betting Too much in a Friendly Game of Cards”, by Latosik, in Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, (p. 69). Latosik includes an epigraph from the first section of Song of Roland. Both poets rely on song, for example, “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, for McFadden, who compares paranoia with erotomania. Both employ the motif of the garden, Biblical, postlapsarian, ripening. Domestic disputes result in writer’s block, on occasion, with anecdotal evidence. Dennis Cooley has done some academic study of the long poem on the prairies but Toronto poet McFadden indulges in “that list of complaints” (p. 101), what men endure, from and on account of their wives, facing their own problems of ageing and the sting of mortality.

And the mind is becoming
more and more
like the chair there
steadfast as a star
radiant as a chair
or at least
the chair there.

I am where I am.

I am chair, I am.

These philosophical meanderings are surprisingly affective and effective outcomes, of which he concludes:

While I slept I thought
about this poem and developed
a marvelous end technique
that not only resolved this piece
but resolved problems I’ve been
trying to vocalize all my life
and I knew that finally
everyone would understand me

even Doug, Gerry, Vic D’Or
and the women at No. 9.

(p. 105)

Compare section XXII of McFadden’s “The Poet’s Progress”, about:

When the dentist left the room
my hand went up his nurse’s skirt.

(p. 106)

with “Plea to a Dentist for More Freezing” (Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, p. 45) The ultimate problem wife (“The Thought Box: after Ted Hughes, by Latosik, p. 75) Their verbal dexterity is classic, as expressed by Latosik,

A crowd of someone else’s details
gathering around you, becoming your details,
growing inside you like a vine,
growing like times of confusion.

(“Something Inside That Grows Like a Vine, p. 35)

McFadden extends to but is not limited by lapses into amnesia. McFadden confesses to the fact “there are colours I cannot name” and “I can’t describe the tie” (p. 910)He cannot identify previously familiar paintings which hang on the wall (p. 83) He cannot remember the tree before today, strange” (p. 81)

While Latosik ponders VOMIT, McFadden struggles with indigestible food, before regaining his appetite.

I’ve tried to be honest and sincere
as well as dishonest and insincere

and my appetite has returned.

(p. 107)

The next section “I Don’t Know” arises from Emperor Wu of Liange and a response by Bodhidharma. This long poem combines the Calgary Stampede with ancient Franks and Druids, as well as “the occasional Abyssinian maid” (p. 111) with a Biblical turn of phrase,

For it does not befit a man
to worry overmuch about his verse.

(p. 13)

His interview on community television takes on epic proportions, because

for TV is to me as writing
was to Homer, a new technology
not to be trusted

(p. 126)

In the next section “Night of Endless Radiance”, he culls Sappho, the Great Lakes, Hiroshima, a mermaid, A.Y. Jackson, and a lengthy meditation on Night. The role of the Dreamer in Romance Literature is to unleash the subconscious, permitting the free-flow of thoughts, images and ideas, unimpeded by the conscious or daytime mind.

In “A New Romance”, McFadden makes it possible for the stand-up comedian to be replaced by the poet on stage. It is “The Family of words” that entices the poet “on his invisible/pony” (p. 157) He opines on the whole poetic race, and “Small words floated down.” (p. 164) His sense of humour can hardly be unintentional, despite his claims, when he exclaims,

Oh for a mind as pure and neat
as a fresh box of Keenex or a roll
of Scotch tape or a hot roll

(p. 167)

A speaker must be effortless, just as a poet can or ought to be. 

McFadden explores

the new romance will move around you
as water moves around each little fish

(p. 175)

an ineluctable description, glimpsed as goldfish and shark, in Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, by Latosik. 

While reading McFadden, I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with the enormity and breadth of the poet’s vision, extolling what mankind can attain, if only we embrace the cosmos.

and as the poet sweeps he eagerly
awaits the arrival
of the lover, and laughs
at his own arousal—
the sun and moon laugh too.

(p. 176)

In the next section “Country of the Open Heart”, McFadden alludes to Catallus, Venus and Adonis, in the same context as a giant tapeworm forming a cave in the centre of the brain (pp. 180-1) The mock heroic epitaph reduces “The entire Pacific Ocean” to “a Spanish onion”. (p. 183) He refers to “Empty Lives passing through your Open Heart?” (p. 184)

 In “The Cow That Swam Lake Ontario”, the poet writes as her coach, likening the bovine to Marilyn Bell who swan Lake Ontario.

and as you can imagine I’m really tired,
although not as tired as that cow must have been
after its great escape from the camp of death.

(p. 207)

In “Nevada Standstill”, the poet begins with Virgina Woolf’s diaries and comments about her novel Night and Day, Marcel Proust, and how a poet requires a nom de plume. He adds, “I am Nevada and when I try to stand still/no matter how hard I try I notice I’m not.” (p. 221)

In “Cow Swims Lake Ontario, Or, The Case of the Waterloggd Quadruped”, the poet writes “for unhappy people everywhere.” The poem is from the point of view of the cow.

In “Danny Quebec”, he offers “Grace to Jehovah and Heavenly Hosts.”

Anne Burke

Review of Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity, by S. Leigh Matthews (University of Calgary Press, 2010) 418 pp. paper $39.95 Indexed.

The prairie region was considered to be nothing other than a veritable wasteland, an area ill-suited for settlement and agriculture.  By the 1850s and 1860s, the area was favoured as the new Eden in the new dominion; concomitant with the values of aggression, dominance; and conquest of one gender over another, one culture over another; or even of humans over nature.  The concepts of Noble Savage and Vanishing Indian, by their absence, whether absorbed or distinct or provided with inclusion as extended family, were not (intentionally) racist.

Specific to Alberta, Mathews relies on Stan Rowe’s 1987 essay “The First 100 Years: Land Use in the Prairies” and Clara Middleton’s Green Fields Afar: Memories of Alberta Days (1947) of Carstairs, “I notice with delight that the prairie was not as dead-flat as in Saskatchewan or North Dakota”.  Ferne Nelson, in Barefoot on the Prairie: Memoirs of Life on a Prairie Homestead (1989), writes of “the gentle curves of the prairie” in Alberta (cited p. 303)

The author began reading memoirs simultaneously with contemporary and historiographical constructions of prairie life. These memoirists focused less on the specifics than on the narrative space devoted to more personal, tactile subjects of the prairie story.  She reveals herself as an eco-conscious reader of memoirs largely written after World War II or 1950.

The texts were written both from within and against agriculture as the building block of the nation.  Prairie memoirists openly or implicitly confront agricultural narratives, “allowing other subjects of prairie life to erupt through a seemingly conventional surface.” (p. 300).

These memoirs extend the confrontational potential of the memoir genre “by exhibiting a co-consciousness that effectively revisions the dominative and exploitive nature of large-scale agricultural practices.” (p. 300). The homesteading laws appeared to be more conducive to bachelor immigration to the Canadian West than the settlement of family units intent on a farming lifestyle. Indeed, “Canada is a man’s country” (Twentieth Century Canada, 1906).

A predominant source for relevant titles was the Bruce Peel Bibliography website at http://peel.library.ca.  The subjects of Matthews’ research are all relegated to a chapter on the “Seemingly Trivial” on the gap between domestic idyll and reality; sacred domestic objects and other household belongings; bread baking, cooking and knitting.  She engages in a discussion of the experience of childbirth, given the deprivation on western farms, with no electricity, running water, or privacy for hygiene.  There are some memory gaps and they lacked a sense of permanency. The Temperance Colonization Society, formed in 1882, was important to the colonization of Western Canada.

In a Chapter on Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (1836); Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852); and Elinro Marsden Eliot, My Canada (1915), there is the dichotomy of “Dauntless Optimism/Perverse Endurance: Re-Visioning Literary Narratives of Settler Women”.  Emily Ferguson’s description of the “Pit” area of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange corresponds with Durkin’s golden image of wheat farming: “When I was a little girl I heard tell that the rainbow followed the plough.  This may be true, but one end of the bow rests on this Pit, and at its foot may be found the proverbial bag of gold” (Open Trails, 1912, p. 188, cited p. 195, note 31).

Autobiography is a biography written by the subject about herself. A memoir is written by the subject about the people and events that the author has known or witnessed, and also from a private diary or journal which offers a day-to-day record of the events in one’s life, written for personal use and satisfaction, with little or no thought of publication. (A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams, 7th edition, Harcourt Brace, Fort Worth, 1999, p. 22)

The aim of studying this genre is to challenge the cultural images of Prairie Woman as well as the process of settlement.   Such texts seem to have been ignored in Canadian scholarship. The author convincingly makes the case that this “herstorical” lack is, by now, so well-documented that, it is beyond the scope of her examination to provide any substantial overview.   She suggests that the reader examine the sources, which purport to be concerned with a Saskatchewan context, but document a number of general prairie histories “which neglect women’s presence.” (p. 40)

Throughout,  Matthews draws on theoreticians, Helen Buss, for example, in Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography (1993), and Eliane Leslau Silverman, in “Women’s Perceptions of Marriage on the Alberta Frontier,” Building Beyond the Homestead (University of Calgary Press, 1988); The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier, 1880-1930 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1984); and “Women and the Victorian Ethic on the Alberta Frontier: Prescription and Description,” The New Provinces: Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1905-1980 (Tantalus Research, 1980).

The “precarious perch” of the decent woman, a domestic Angel, begins with a physical metaphor of the inability of a Victorian woman to balance on account of her corsets; then moves past physical constrictions to societal expectations of a domestic icon, pure and pious, frail or delicate, dependant on males.  The moment of “looking back” combines with the danger of falling from grace or invalidation of society’s values, due to the puritan state of mind on the prairie.  The identification of woman with the land, to be settled by the male as the conqueror, is pervasive.  Meanwhile, women as producers and reproducers, represent the future of colonization.

In “The Landscape Behind It”, the author explores an enduring cultural image of western land settlement as that of the white (assumedly male) prairie farmer and the post natural, agricultural landscape, usually devoid of any trace of either First Nations or non-human animal presence. 

A similar image is depicted in Rudy Wiebe’s autobiographical memoir Of This Earth (Vintage Canada, 2009) which I have reviewed elsewhere. He sensitively portrays his mother and the early death of his sister in a pioneer setting of Speedwell, Saskatchewan.
Dorothy Livesay edited the Collection Poems of Raymond Knister, poet and Ontario farmer.  There is the extended metaphor of writing and ploughing with the literal horsepower of Clydesdales.

According to Matthews, the plough is “a system, not only a piece of technology, an ideology of improvement, a language opposed to wilderness, nature and idleness.” (p. 307) She acknowledges the importance of a prairie woman settler’s garden to the household, for example, and gathering or berry-picking.

The agrarian myth is of a team of horses used to plough the land and controlled by a driver. He walks alone across the prairie landscape, suggesting the ideal ensuring prosperity.  The image of a lone human male is seen, literally and figuratively, scattering his seeds in the cultivation of a nation.  This overriding image of man’s vertical relationship to the landscape, in the service of creation of a nation, has pertinence “for a contextual understanding of land settlement issues.” (p. 298)

We find other contexts and texts, in Laurie Ricou’s Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (University of British Columbia Press, 1973) and Judy Schultz, in Mamie’s Children: Three Generations of Prairie Women (1997). There is the language of conquering the frontier and everything on it that had to be conquered.  Sod has to be “busted”, horses had to be “broken”, dogs and women had to be “tamed” Not so far a-field as Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, but Matthews includes Dick Harrison’s alternative images of a human presence to man’s dominating attitude towards the prairie landscape. The Manmade wild nature must be cultivated and domesticated along survivalist lines (witness Margaret Atwood’s Survival) family-centred, rather than profit-motivated.

There are extensions and applications of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, introduction by Cheryll Glotfelt and Riane Eisler (University of Georgia Press, 1996).  Even in women’s selected memoirs, we still discover a father at the plough, “gloried in the prospect of the virgin land in need of mastering.”  (p. 299)  Other contexts are: “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (University of Illinois Press, 1998) pp. 74-96; as well as on upholding Animal Rights and Feminist Theory, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Duke University Press, 1995) pp. 1-8; Mrs. Bentley (by Lorna Crozier) a character from As For Me and My House, by Sinclair Ross, and the Bentleys, by Dennis Cooley, a long, narrative prairie poem.   Some fathers, in terms of their treatment of animals, are depicted unfavourably.

In “Conclusions”, Matthews reflects on her grandmother in the larger picture of the Prairie Woman’s reality, in real life, not sanitized.  She interprets the memoir as a form which rejects the climax for the nonlinear “along the way”. (p. 385) This is the art of looking back, a sort of redress, representing a feminist approach to re-visioning “beneath the surface”; in the here and now, not the next year country of men.  In gender-dominated contemporary narratives of settlement, females and their bodies could be judged for transgressions of geographic boundaries in life and texts. 

This landmark approach contains a Bibliography of thirty accounts in “The Memoirs” and two-hundred-and-fifty “Primary and Secondary Sources.”

Anne Burke

Reviews of for And against, by Sharon McCartney (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2010) 76 pp. paper $17.95 &The Glassblowers, by George Sipos (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2010) 103 pp. paper $17.95.

This new collection for And Against contains 63 lyric poems.  Based on the titles, there are seven “For” poems and 21 “Against”; only “For (Against) Judith” contains both.

In the opening prose poem, the persona of the poet, like T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, measures her life out in coffee spoons. Her husband is a stranger to her, their divorce imminent; their trajectories never meet (“Against Parallelism”, p. 32) and yet they must embrace a world “without parallel”) within which she celebrates her own asymmetry.

Their dog/cat analogous relationship recurs, for example, washing the dog after it was sprayed (“Against Skunks”, p. 53) is a not so subtle reference to her disavowal of marriage. Her mother’s fate was decided by the time she was twenty, “Against Form (Lake Huron)”; she was a people pleaser at 60 (“Against Skinny-Dipping)”. As a girl, the poet was forced to wear “the cropped dresses” (“Against All That”, p. 45)

With the passage of seasons, humanity is stockpiling petty resentment. Whether they are war and revolution, or class warfare, she suffers from fevers, pain, and aches; scars anger and self-blame. In parsing the word “yield”, she seeks to dull the pain with alcohol, or with other reverie-addicts. Note the figurative language, of “an eight-foot Shiva of snow” (p. 17), and a golden congelation (“Risotto” p. 38). Their relationships appear as if they are: “stitching our ragged dehiscence into an uneven seam” (“After Roncevalles”, p. 48)

Coyotes are bush rats, crows rant, and she communes with the horses (“Mrs. Oliver Mellors”.) In “the hegemonic ordinariness of morning”, lovemaking becomes “your unsanitized cells in mine, organic, meiotic, benign.” (“Against Sanitation”, p. 16) These “post-coital attitudes” (p. 18) are quite simply part of a moribund marriage (“Through”, p. 20). As wild animals engage in savage sex (p. 26), domestic bliss was replaced by domestic hell, (“Sixteen Years Ago”); to become a divorce-of-the-month club (“Tsunami, Earthquake, Hurricane”.) She alludes to ex-sex (“And Now the Looting Begins,” p. 52)

The hospital provides the setting for opiate birthing, morphine-induced confusion, (“How They Died”, p. 18.) She indulges in an elaboration on The Wizard of Oz, (“Dorothy”, p. 38); imagining Anna Karena (“Refuse ((Against Tolstoy))”), and “Snow White”; from the point of view of historical figures, such as Marie Antoinette and Lady Ashley.

The poems yield local colour, Lansdowne and Beaverbrook; Algonquin, Adirondack; and Niagara rocks are brought down by “failure, rejection, divorce” (“Cataract”, p. 32) One poem personifies an ATM.

McCartney has a Masters of Fine Art in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a degree in law from the University of Victoria. She works as a legal editor and is Poetry Editor for The Fiddlehead. This new title follows Against (Frog Hollow Press, 2007); The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder(Nightwood Editions, 2007); Switchgrass Stills (littlefishcartpress, 2006); Karenin Sings the Blues, (Goose Lane Editions, 2003), and Under the Abdominal Wall (Anvil Press, 1999).

There are fifty-five poems in The Glassblowers, a second book for Sipos, following Anything but the Moon, which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award of Poetry.

This refined language and rarified atmosphere offers a healing local landscape, “Think how seeds exhaust themselves into grain/their recurring language burdened, as you are/each line entwined with the sound of a voice, /a tractor, /someone you have forgotten.” (“Interlinear”, p. 66)

The title poem, based in Biblical sources, describes a factory which is subsequently revealed to be a metaphor for vision,

the dark solidity of the world seen through glass,
everything visible damned and blessed
into light.

(p. 23)

In Section One “Earthlight meantime”, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel is set in the Edenic garden (“Lilacs”, p. 13). There is an escalator or moving floor of fields, waves, leaves, and scent (“Montford Field”, p. 15) His poems never “slip into clichés: skid, drive into ditches” (“Zodiac”, p. 16) The god Orion appears in the Great Nebula, (“Lunar Eclipse”); Bruce Cockburn on the radio while he is at Two Mile Flat (“Speechless”)

Atlantis is sighted (“The Astronomers”) but Zodiac refers to the Coast Guard. Light is indistinct, “something casual like that/the sea sloughs off.” (“Sometimes the light”, p. 21)

The firmament inscribes and transcribes itself onto our bodies (“Cloud Chamber”). Without malice, nature is trusting, even the sheep on whose wool” the dew of pre-dawn/no longer/ripple[s] their wool like sand.  Only the poet is capable of expressing nature’s deep reserves, spring/sprung into language, and preserves the transitory.

In Section Two “Metasequoia”, the poet situates us in time and place, Hubei Province, 1941, (“Dawn Redwood”), or aboard a ship, sailing north/up Trincomaki Channel at 3:00 a.m. (“Freighter”, p. 30). juxtaposing Guy Lombardo with Jumbo, a circus and roadbed which lead nowhere (“L& PS Railway”, p. 33) He is attuned to harbour (“Sooke Harbour”), because he does not live near it; even the cows have nowhere to go. (“Parle-moi”). Swans outclass ordinary birds (“Platonic”).

In Section Three, “The minor key of the dominant”, violence erupts when a man’s coffee grows cold (“Somewhere in the city”, p. 39) He enjoins in “Sonata Form” with Buddhist contemplations of birds/day/night.  He identifies with exile (“Trotsky”) He satirizes women who are Pro-Life, because they are “happy” making fudge. The ironies abound, post-childbearing women protesting abortion, wearing their spatulas like surgeons. (“Pro-Life at the Ex”, p. 44) Interacting with and Reacting to nature, with a retriever (“12 Gauge”), and a horse (“Sarabande”, p. 51); a forest transformed (“After the Storm”), the first//also the last” (“CERN”, p. 50). 

Human relations are displayed in Section Four “Willie Loves Lucy”, referencing a tree which was branded with their linked names, in 1974; using frog songs, exhausted (“interlinear”) and Belgian mares  (“Here, by the gate”); with similes, “like snapdragons, like helium”, p. 58)  Sea and sky merge into past relations, “you and I—a squall-line” (“Squall-line”, p. 62) hiking green mountains near the Pacific (“Mt. McBride”, p. 63) the tide returns, (“Midden”, p. 64)  The landscape becomes an extended ghazal, with Persian poetry and imbued with nostalgia

Like McCartney, he alludes to the nectar of the gods being coffee, but a goddess/waitresses serves him, and, “as she poured the coffee black into the white,” she simultaneously fills up the/his void of the morning, you might say.” (“Sibyl”, p. 67) and section “Five” is devoted to “Coffee and steamed milk”, as a kind of seamanship (“Inga”); by which the sea “is ruffled with goosebumps” (“Arbutua, South Shore”, p. 76) A man plays “the cello:/life, a woman” (“arco/pizz”, p. 72); chumming with Iris Murdoch or Jeanne Moreau. (“On s’est perdus de vue”, p. 74) With an incantatory choral, he produced an ode:

To those whose work is such syntax—
the cats by which the day begins,
the acts by which all days begin: coffee
and steamed milk, china cups,
little oblongs of sugar wrapped in paper.

(“Acknowledgments”, p. 77)

Sipos is Executive Director of ArtSpring, a visual and performing Arts Centre. He owned and managed Mosquito Books, managed the Prince George Symphony, and taught English at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Anne Burke

Review of Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, by Shawna M. Quinn (Goose Lane Editions and The New Brunswick Military Project, Volume 15, 2010) 176 pp. paper $16.95 Bibliography. Indexed, black-and-white photographs.

At the outset, I confess to a personal interest in this subject matter because my mother was a registered nurse who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Her education was High School and courses taught by physicians in Anatomy, Chemistry, and Nutrition, at the Montreal General Hospital.

She worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Montreal. Stateside, the position came with room and board, not much more than about $2.60 a day, with a half-a-day off per week. Her professional experience ended just prior to the Second World War.  (Nevertheless, she suffered from scarlet fever and was at risk from other illnesses due to nursing.) However, she related stories of the First World War.  In particular, there was a young man who returned from the Front and whose life was never the same, because he had been mustard-gassed in the trenches.

Ironically, the Great War was to have been The War to End All Wars.  This bears repeating to a generation whose knowledge is somewhat limited to Afghanistan and Iraq; Cyprus and Turkey; Israel and Palestine; as well as to those who are old enough to recall the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The subtitle and moniker “Sister” was an anachronism, applied to military nurses, from the time when the religious orders did full-time nursing.  For my part, I role-played Superman, with my mother’s scarlet-lined cape, when I wasn’t borrowing her white stockings and nursing cap, from a trunk.  When not on duty, she wore a grey wool suit, which was my idea of a professional woman, and a career she had abandoned to give birth to me in 1951.  She was forty-years-old, married for two years, and with other, younger women, who were house-bound in the suburbs.

Agnes Warner (1872-1926) graduated from McGill College in Montreal and the Presbyterian Hospital, in New York, before traveling to the Swiss border in 1914.  She received the Croix de Guerre medal.   This compact monograph contains the collected letters (August 2, 1914-January 1, 1917) of a nursing sister which were first published as My Beloved Poilus (St. John, NB: Barnes & Co., 1917).  The original Preface notes that these personal missives, to friends and family members, were not written for publication.  Nurse Florence Nightingale from the Crimean War was the model held up to women who were motivated to join the Red Cross and serve in France.  The present editor augments the correspondence, with newspaper accounts, documents, maps, and other period memorabilia

Warner writes of the dreary days and long nights, the seemingly inescapable cold. Her first-hand narratives of injuries and sudden death are only relieved by the descriptions of bravery.  Her own compassion and stoicism are evident, when she speaks of one soldier’s experience:

 A boy of twenty went off today...He was almost blown to pieces, poor boy… [T]hey thought he would not live through the night, he was so terribly wounded.  His right arm was gone, he had a bullet in his liver—it is still there— and multiple wounds of head and body.  But he made a wonderful recovery….

                                                                        (p. 96)

The context of women’s rights and responsibilities, their roles as nurses, aids, and clerks, as well as temporarily replacing men in factory and farm occupations, are further explored by Angela K. Smith, in The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Some other resources for this period are: Lights Out! A Canadian Nursing Sister’s Tale, by Katherine Wilson-Simmie, (Belleville, Ontario: Mika, 1981); Our Bit: Memories of War Service by a Canadian Nursing Sister by Mabel Clint (1934); Humour in Tragedy: Hospital Life Behind 3 Fronts by a Canadian Nursing Sister, by Constance Bruce (London: Skeffington, 1918); Nobody Ever Wins a War: The War Diaries of Ella Mae Bongard, R.N., edited by her son Eric Scott (Ottawa: Janeric Enterprises, 1998); The War Diary of Clare Gass, 1915-1918, edited by Susan Mann, her biographer (Montreal and Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

When my mother put pen-to-paper it was a piece of short fiction, to extol the wonder drug Penicillin, which saved the lives of countless patients and, in this instance, her dentist brother, along with long-lost letters to friends and family.  Thus, has been the fate of diaries and other personal accounts, because they were largely unpublished, and not considered official or of sufficient worth to preserve.

I still have her textbooks in Anatomy and Nutrition.  We used to laugh because the sexual organs have been omitted.  (It was not considered proper for women to learn about them). Her father fully funded his sons to graduate from university but advised his only daughter to concentrate on flower-arranging and playing piano.  After a course in business and a brief stint as a secretary, she enrolled in the new nursing program.  Students were bright and motivated, but lacked funds, so that after they graduated, most had on the job training: carrying bed pans, assisting doctors in the operating room, and tending to patients, with medications, back rubs, etc. She did private duty work and then cared for her father who died of liver cancer.

Shawna M. Quinn has a Bachelors in Biology-Psychology and a Masters in Arts in History from the University of New Brunswick.  She contributed to a virtual exhibit “Progress and Permanence: Women and the New Brunswick Museum, 1880-1980.”

Anne Burke

Review of “Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun”: Canadian Publishing and the Correspondence of Sinclair Ross, 1933-1986, selected and with an introduction by Jordan Stouck, Annotations by David Stouck (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010) paper 344 pps. $34.95 Indexed.

This collection of extant letters, from Atwood to Wiseman and many others, are from friends, fellow writers, and editor-publishers, and their replies from Sinclair Ross (1908-1996).  The correspondence is arranged according to the five major periods of his writing life: the early short stories and As For Me and My House; the mid-career short stories and The Well; Whir of Gold; Sawbones Memorial; and his final period.

Much can be gleamed from these writings, not only biographical facts but, perhaps more importantly, about his creative process.  In a postscript, Ross muses,  “As I read this over, it occurs to me that over the past 32 years I have very seldom felt impelled to speak up on behalf of Mrs. B[entley].  It’s usually ‘That terrible Philip—what a life for the poor woman,’ and my reply, even though not spoken, is ‘Think of the poor man with her always waiting outside the study door, fixed on him.’ In other words, my basic sympathies are with him.” (p. 170)

Lorna Crozier has redressed this imbalance, with her “A Saving Grace”: Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley (McClelland and Stewart 1996).  Dennis Cooley composed a long prairie poem, the bentleys (The University of Alberta Press, 2006).  Cooley combines poetics with documentary in his “Wind And Horses: a puritan tale of romance and intrigue set on the dirty thirties”, Dramatis Personae, copyright by Sinclair Ross, West of Eden Productions, 1947, a playbill with an afterword.”  “Wind And Horses” seems to be, in part, inspired by Ross in “Just Wind and Horses: A Memoir”, The Macmillan Anthology, Toronto: Macmillan, 1988, 83-97.

Part One “American Dream” contains letters from 1933-1945.  Part Two offers his “Canadian Failure” Letters from 1946-1960.  Elsewhere, David Stouck observed, “His larger dreams had not materialized—he was not, according to the standards of his era, a successful man for, as he would say, he never had a wife, owned a home or drove a car” in As For Sinclair Ross, (University of Toronto Press, 2005) p. 286.  Ross quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that “nothing fails like success…and sometimes not to succeed in the cheap, popular terms of success is perhaps a blessing.” (Collecting Stamps, p. 271) Part Three “Modest Hopes” contains Letters from 1962-1971.  Part Four “Succés d’estime has Letters from 1972-1974.  Part Five “Literary Forefather” contains Letters from 1975-1986. 

An Appendix offers an Interview with Sinclair Ross, 1971, Canadian Writers on Tape, Toronto, 1971.  Fortunately, Ross made a taped interview with Earle Toppings, in 1970, for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Series, reproduced here, in full (pp. 259-272).

The text is augmented with documents: photo reproductions of postcards, a black-and-white publicity photo, 1941; a photograph of Ross at his desk (from Royal Bank Archives) in the advertising office of the Royal Bank of Canada, Montreal, 1962; a photo of Ross in retirement in Spain, 1972, and, finally, in a private room at the Vancouver Veteran’s Home. (The latter was reproduced on the cover). 

In addition to the foreseeable missives from writers, publishers, agents, and editors, there is the unexpected confidential letter from the Editor of The Royal Bank Magazine, expressing praise for Ross’s exceptional talents as a writer and how “it seems a shame not to capitalize on them.” (p. 193) Although the stereotypical lone wolf mentality prevails, we also encounter Ross socializing with friends in Vancouver (in 1992), John O’Connor, Irene Harvalis, David Stouck, and Mary-Ann Stouck. Grant Macdonald was a Kingston illustrator who sketched Ross in 1948.  Ross responds to Grant about fresh beginnings and the “effect of making me feel important, that I really amount to something, and while, as I have already told you, I have a compulsive tendency to reject all such [praise], I am none the less grateful and encouraged.” (p. 49) Doris Saunders was a supporter at the University of Manitoba.  Professor Roy Daniells suggested that As For Me and My House was “the great Canadian novel, we have been waiting for” (p. 10) 1941. In turn, Ross signed himself affectionately as “Jimmy S. Ross”. There is a caricature of Ross by Isaac Bickerstaff from Tamarack Review, October 1975. Ross’s maternal uncle, a popular journalist, travel writer, lecturer, and author of more than twenty books, was knighted.  Ross received The Order of Canada in 1992.

The editors provide an abbreviated description of primary sources, an updated account of archival materials, and a list of secondary sources specific to this volume of Ross correspondence.  They did not attempt a full account of primary and secondary sources, but, instead, direct the reader to David Latham’s “A Reference Guide to Sinclair Ross”, in From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross, edited by John Moss (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992).  Bibliographical information, since 1990, can be found on the website for Andrew Lesk, University of Toronto. As for Archival Sources for Published Works by Sinclair Ross and Unpublished Manuscripts, most are still scattered in private holdings across Canada, in the archives of Macmillan and McClelland & Stewart (at McMaster University), and some items are in Public Collections.

Even a cursory view of the Chronology reveals that Ross was an outstanding exemplar of the writing life, producing work at a time when little was thought of Canadian Literature and Letters.  Although his education was limited to secondary school, he was a voracious reader and autodidact.  Nevertheless, his wry humour, always at his own expense, is clear from his remark in a 1972 letter to David Stouck,  “And I think the writing holds its own, although somebody reviewing it [Whir of Gold] in the Windsor Star, a bit viciously, said ‘Ross is reluctant to write a sentence…’ Well, I suppose it’s all part of the game or business or what somebody has called ‘the lamentable trade of letters.’ Stamps or butterflies would have been more fun.” (p. 140)

Admittedly, Margaret Laurence gave Ross credit for inspiring her own short story cycles of Manitoba’s Manawaka series, in her introduction to the New Canadian Library paperback Lamp at Noon. Ross was born and raised in Saskatchewan.  He moved to Montreal as a result of his work, after serving in the military overseas with the Ordinance Corps, in London, England. His remaining years were passed at a veteran’s hospital in Vancouver.  Did Ross even view himself as a literary mentor and forefather?  He insisted that he was a banker who wrote in what little spare time he had.

There is an unpublished short story “Old Chippendale” and “The Troopship Story” is an incomplete war memoir.  Ross destroyed a manuscript of “Teddy Do”, a novel about incest and pedophilia, a further exploration of the Philip-Steve relationship of As For Me and My House, and “The Flowers That Killed Him.” There was a sequel to Sawbones Memorial.

Among other concerns, Ross struggled with genre, “I am really a short story writer [but] I have the wind for a novella.” (p. 172)  Further, “I woke up to the number of novellas which publishers are bringing out these days.” (p. 174) “[S]uch a lot of money for a novella—who’s going to fork out?” (p. 189) He concludes, “If I was starting out again I think I’d concentrate on the novella.” (p. 258)

Given that Ross, (as Robert Kroetsch indicated in the obituary tribute and cited by David Stouck, in As for Sinclair Ross, p. 297), “embraced his historical moment with a kind of invisibility...The scarcity of personal material makes the glimpse we have of Ross in this [1971] interview that much more valuable.  (cited p. 259)

I have always associated his work and more recently, his life with that of J.D. Salinger (1919-2010), including the intense public acclaim (and author’s reclusive response) to The Catcher in the Rye, 1951, which caused the author’s retreat from the public and still sells 250,000 copies a year.  Subsequent, but lesser-known, short story collections, were: Nine Stories (1953), and a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).  His last published work was also a novella, “Hapworth 16, 1924, in The New Yorker, on June 19, 1965.  There is even a short story “Teddy” about a boy with unusual thoughts. In 1948, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was published in The New Yorker magazine, which also published much of his subsequent work.

Ross was not only reading The New Yorker, he was submitting his short stories, beginning in the spring of 1934, adapting local details.  He was still reading The New Yorker in the late 1980s, albeit borrowed copies from Keath Fraser.

Ross does not mention Salinger in his list of influential books he shares with his biographer Lorraine McMullen, but he confesses that he has lapses in memory, to the extent that he fabricates an influence in his only taped interview, because “I was extremely nervous and had to say somebody.” (p. 219).

As For Me and My House was first published in 1949.  It sold fewer than 300 copies.  “At the centre is Ross, a reclusive man who almost invariably refused interviews and never gave public readings, but who always answered his mail.” (Introduction”, p. x).  Salinger gave his final interview in 1980, but only because of a court order and he wanted to suppress the unauthorized use of his work.

Further, Jordan Stouck points out that Ross refused to publicly admit his homosexuality, even in personal correspondence.  Ross’s letters never describe his homosexual experiences, but they do record some of his relationships with men and of desire in his writings.  Critics have already explored the unconventional permutations of sexual desires in his novels and short stories, given the social prohibitions that informed the encoded patterns of desire in his writings.

The fact remains that Ross destroyed a novel about man-boy love, he did not leave a diary or personal journal, but he still dared to dream of a well-paying and popular career as an author. His ambivalence is typical, given the frustration of his aspirations to become known and independent, while safeguarding his privacy.  His attempts to place stories with high-paying American markets were not successful, so that his dream was not realized. No wonder he concluded, “the writing life wasn’t worth the candle.” (p. 258)

When I was a graduate student at the University of Ottawa I wrote to Ross, in care of his publisher McClelland and Stewart, and, much to my delight, he responded.  His mailing address was quite simply Málaga, Spain, and my dubious Professor (rather than being impressed by my initiative?) thought that I might be withholding additional mailing information.  Fortunately, all was well when Lorraine McMullen (1926-2002)  and Ken Mitchell of the University of Regina  not only corresponded for a Twayne World Authors Series biography (1979) Lorraine was writing by 18 June 1976,  but also visited him in Spain, in early 1977. Mitchell produced Sinclair Ross: A Reader’s Guide. Moose Jaw: Coteau Books,   1981.  Keath Fraser produced a memoir, As For Me and My Body (ECW Press, 1997) which “outed” Ross as a gay man.

I had researched his other uncollected short stories published in serial or magazine form in Saturday Night, Queen’s Quarterly, Journal of Canadian Fiction which probably tweaked his interest.  This other anecdote may have been apocryphal but two students were welcomed into his home, until he heard from them, yet again, about his acclaimed As For Me And My House, an honour which frustrated him more than words can convey.

By 2001, there were new editions of his now classic Canadian short story collections, including The Lamp At Noon and Other Stories, and a paperback of his novels, Sawbones Memorial, The Well, and Whir of Gold, with a new collection The Race and Other Stories, edited by McMullen (University of Ottawa Press, 1982).  University of Alberta Press has made available to a new generation Ross’s seminal work, with new introductions: Sawbones Memorial, Introduced by Ken Mitchell, Whir of Gold, Introduced by Nat Hardy, and The Well, Introduced by Kristjana Gunnars.  The present collection of correspondence more than adequately complements the fiction and makes available original, previously unpublished, primary materials.

Jordan Stouck teaches Discourse Analysis at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus), with a particular interest in Canadian and Caribbean diasporic cultures and the history of Canadian Literature. 

David Stouck is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University.  He produced biographies of Ethel Wilson and of Sinclair Ross, and edited As for Sinclair Ross, a collection of Ross Criticism for University of Toronto Press, (2005).

Anne Burke

Review of Will The Real Alberta Please Stand Up?, by Geo Takach (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010) 456 pp. paper $34.95. Indexed. black-and-white photographs. Bibliography.

Margaret Atwood, the first recipient of the Bob Edwards Award, noted that we are all immigrants here; she might have added “itinerants” or “nomads.”  Myrna Kostash, in a vein of political correctness, adds, “Don’t just take what white folks tell you at face value.”

As for Takach’s motivation to express his frustration and fascination with the Province of Alberta, at the outset he reveals “Like many Albertans, I escaped to here from somewhere else.”  As a result he was sensitive to discrimination and writes about Alberta as though he is, at times, an almost unwilling convert.

This compilation of fiction, nonfiction, and astute observation employs the Socratic method of philosophical questioning.  This is a skillfully astute summary of our political tapestry which discloses/reveals/revels in a province that is eclectic, with a kaleidoscope of colours, in both the natural and human varieties of landscape.

With a nod to the literary, Carl Sandburg’s 1918 poem “Prairie” and a “Toast to Alberta”, 1893, by Stephan G. Stephansson, Takach rapidly and breathtakingly rolls out Statistics Canada, poised with a Wikipedic and encyclopedic grasp of the facts. He becomes a conduit, an empty vessel, as an able proponent for (and against) free-ranging ideologies, from Jackie Flanagan’s “new” Western Alberta Views, as much as for the credo of William Aberhart’s Christian Bible Belt, and Ernest Manning’s thirty-year reign of Social Credit, from a radical regional perspective.

His invocation to his Muse is derived from a “near”-life-long interest in a province he has only called “home” since the glory days of disco.  He has escaped  the Front de Libération de Québec’s mail bombs and the land of Trudeau’s War Measures Act, after the abduction of Cross, a British ambassador to Canada, and Pierre Laporte (found murdered in the trunk of his car.)  The FLQ are not a distant memory.  Among other atrocities, books on “Cubism” were seized by the RCMP from private households due to a language barrier, the art sounded like “Cuba”.  

The author, a professional writer for two decades, hails from a Québec which featured tanks with armed military in the streets.  He refers to himself as a weekend project for his parents fleeing then-Communist Hungary.  Takach displays Bob Edwards’ caustic wit, self-confident take-no-prisoners tone, and does not abide fools gladly.

No doubt, the author has a very personal stake in the outcome.  He underscores how the French and the English “don’t always get along”.  Further, that members of the two founding nations “club” liked outsiders about as much as they liked each other [which they didn’t]”.

 “So we packed up and pointed the hood ornament westward.” The West has always been a hotbed for immigration, in waves, by ship, and cross-country; a soulless and soulful assortment as ever one could imagine.  Takach takes full advantage of his artistic license. 

At an early age he was “ever-sensitized” to prejudice. On his arrival, as a school boy, he was already defending Alberta against Ontario and Québec.  Having been freed “from the colonial bondage of biculturalism, I embraced our new home with the zeal of a revivalist rally.”  By turns, he was embarrassed, appreciative and proud; then furious when Albertans depicted the Province as a “backwater.”

According to Takach, the landscape inspired Leslie Takach, a painter and his father, who followed the call of the West from Quebec in the mid-1970s, after an earlier escape from Soviet-stained Hungary.

While he found a similar sense of liberation on entering friendlier Alberta, the vastness also made him feel more vulnerable and exposed than before.  “The sky is different, the horizon is wider, the colours are clean,” the father enthuses, “so this is a paradise for an artist, to create and copy the land.  It is like a dream of Walt Disney, a super-production.  This is the land I was searching for throughout my life.” (p. 24)

The Royal Alberta Museum houses a “Wild Alberta” exhibit, ironically the artful result of taxidermists.  Meanwhile, UNESCO World Heritage Sites abound. Alberta’s topographic weirdness mushrooms, with the hoodoos in the badlands near Drumheller, become the poster children for erosion.  There are both an official grass, rough fescue, and a provincial fish, which has been officially classified as a threatened species. (“Some of us find this ironic.”)

Takach states that he has celebrated the Province’s feats and foibles in print, speeches, films, comedy performances, music, on television, and the Web.  The Bibliography lists some of his articles for Alberta Views, Broadcast Dialogue, and Alberta Report.  We happily add, “Anatomy of an Albertan”, Prairie Journal Prose, No. 19 (1992) 45-49; “Maple Leaf Soul”, No. 37 (2001-02) 3-10; and Writing for Eternity: A Manifesto for a Manic Millennium” No. 48 (2007)39-45. In the latter, “Writing is more than cheap therapy.  And for sisters and brothers of the pen, that just might be eternity enough.” Atwood acknowledges that we “all began in a little magazine.”

This opus opens with a Preface “by” Bob Edwards (1860-1922), whose maternal grandfather, a Scottish immigrant arrived in 1897 in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, by way of a Wyoming ranch and an Iowa farm.  He was editor of the Calgary Eye Opener from 1901 to 1922. Takach envisions himself in mock epic and anti-heroic terms:  “My arrival came after a 3,000-kilometre slog in winter-whiteout conditions, cramped in the back of the family Buick.”

Many of these interviews were part of a parallel project, a one-hour documentary film the author conceived, wrote, hosted, directed and co-produced for City TV.  The DVD is available for order from www.mcnabbconnolly.ca.

“The Maverick Mantra” has recently been attached to Aritha van Herk’s Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2001) about western alienation from central Canada. As a Calgary Herald article opined, “Yet through it all, the idea of Alberta as a province driven by independent-minded groundbreakers has stuck around.  To the rest of Canada, as van Herk described it in her book, we’re still ‘aggravating, awful, awkward, awesome Alberta.’”

The weird implementation, of an otherwise noble goal, of promoting literacy and provoking dialogue about the city, resulted in a recent Calgary Public Library Project initiative called “One Book, One Calgary.”  The goal was to get the entire city reading the same book in order to encourage discussion about the city’s past and future.  Calgary: van Herk and Takach, Edmonton; The Flames: Calgary and The Oilers: Calgary; as van Herk has been described to us, in glowing terms, such praise can be shared with Takach.

Takach thoroughly employs endnotes and footnotes throughout, with a list of “Interviews Cited.” Unlike van Herk’s popular history, which was criticized, as “not academic history, one wonders if it is even good popular history.  Surely a certain level of research, methodology, analysis, and referencing is expected... [not the] lack of even basic referencing to source material used in the book.” (Terry L. Chapman, Medicine Hat College, Labour/Le Travail (Fall, 2007)

Furthermore, “van Herk has seen her carefully chosen titular word [Maverick] go through the wringer.  The term has been adopted, co-opted, misused, abused and reclaimed by politicians, marketers, the Maverick family of Texas, and, of course, Sarah Palin, who, along with Joe Biden, famously dropped the word 15 times in the 90-minutes U.S. vice-presidential debate of 2008.”  See: “Who are Calgary’s new mavericks? Help us name 10 new Calgary pioneers” (Tom Babin, Calgary Herald, September 12, 2010)

Takach describes “rednecks” in relation to social and fiscal conservatives; while nativism, combines with racial, religious or ethnic prejudice; with nationalism, anti-Semitism, eugenics; and Social Credit.  Overall, the ancestral burden of Québec Anglo-Franco animosity to “ethnics” more than outweighs whatever shortcomings this new land has to offer; to the extent he ventures, “That nobody calls the more militant Québecois ‘nationalists’ rednecks is another in a long conga-line of ironies gracing the nation.” (p. 89)

In Webster’s Ninth New College Dictionary,  “maverick” is defined as, a) “an unbranded range animal, especially a motherless calf; b) an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party, c) characteristic of, suggestive of, or inclined to be a maverick”

Takach concludes, “At this point, there are plenty of arguments on both sides of the radical-or-redneck question.  In either case, there is much to support the notion of Albertans as deviants.” (p. 120)

Whether Ralph Klein, John A. Macdonald, or an Interview with Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, (“whom Albertans might take for granite”); Ted Byfield, Preston Manning, — practically speaking, there are simply too many to enumerate here.  The jewel in the Crown of this country is Alberta’s place in Confederation, whether historical, geographical, socio-economical, or otherwise.

Takach refers to Bob Edwards in the foreword, and in relation to Grant MacEwan, Bob introduced the notion that the relative populations estimated by Edmonton will be doubled by Calgary “to prove its imagination is not inferior to Edmonton’s” (p. 148); Takach concurs, and, on truth, Frank Oliver, an Edmontonian newspaperman, “must have borrowed Bob’s credo of ‘never letting the truth stand in the way of a good story’.  At least Mr. Edwards was open about it.” (p. 136).  He cites as a source The Best of Bob Edwards edited by Hugh Dempsey (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1975)

Takach is a consummate and prolific writer, instructor, speaker, and filmmaker based in Wild Rose Country.  He has suffered in his early life and then twice for his art; and now it is your turn to enjoy, and to be entertained, instructed, and enthralled by him.

Anne Burke

Review of This hot place, by Bernadette Wagner (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2010) 80 pp. paper $17.95.

This collection of fifty-seven poems is divided into three sections, by theme or muse, “Maiden”, “Mother”, and, finally, “Crone”.

In “Maiden”, this heroine is counter-culture, who incurs sibling rivalry, the onset of puberty, sexual harassment and sexual assault, the bad boy, wherein religion predominates in the household, diction of the vernacular, in prose poems like “That Time Grandma Asked Me To Find My Sister” and “Corona Hotel”.

The poet observes loss and, unlike her age mates, experiences anticipatory grief, in “Growing Up”.

The setting of auction sales,

Further still, miles and miles
of unbroken prairie where crocuses
push through each spring, where I wander

a child waving at planes.

(“Aerial Photograph”, p. 10)

This is a matriarchal world-view, feminist zeitgeist, with a choral structure of incremental, incantatory repetition of Grandmother’s “curves”, “kleine kind”, “land”, and “Grandmother’s land remembers.” (p. 11) “Grandmother’s creaking gate” (p. 20) “to rock in Grandma’s arms.” (p. 21)

A concrete poem (“Oktoberfest”) with “On Beauty” which dissects a poisoned arrow, with images of knitting, with skeins of yarn.

In “Mother, a dialogue between first-person, who experiences sleep deprivation, (“Not Wanting Any Thing But Sleep”) suffering from post-partum depression; the other voice is in the third-person, text set in italics, of the ideal nurturing mother, juxtaposing alternate realities on the page. (“Motherload”).

She carries with her a copy of A Mother’s Journal, and relies on tranquillizers. (“The Personal is Political”, p. 31) The poem delineates the ages of daughter and son, their childhood experiences as seen through their mother’s eyes.

Newly discovered hazards like “Wascana Creek”, abound. The environment returns to seasonal adjustments, “sky-blue”, whether spring/summer or “A winter week” (“Specimens From The Abbey 2002, p. 37) She pursues right-justified lyrics (“The ‘Help Me’ Beach Ritual”, p. 39) and sprung rhythm (“Lioness”)  Married sex is not as passionate constrained by domestic details. She seeks “a new world. Our only hope” (in an analogy to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”). A Grandmother moon looms large in the window. She compiles Greek mythology with agricultural vocabulary; Osama Bin Laden with a Halloween jack-o-lantern; the cycles of drought.

Our tears are the rains that rid us of hoppers
turn our parched lives into gardens, blooming.

(“Grasshopper’s Song”, p. 48)

She glimpses the perils of free trade, while shopping and with thoughts of shoplifting, exchanges her sisterless fate with quilting:

How I want to pull it from its dowel,

wrap it round our grief,
wipe tears with its wine-red edge.”

(“Sisterless”, p. 52)

Shades continue to inhabit their environs, the mown lawn, the bookshelf, a wooden spoon, especially Grandmother’s yard and how Grandma died (“This Bleeding Heart”, p. 56)

In “Crone”, she embraces five generations of women, three decades after Grandma’s death (“Sa[l]vage Self”) by emanations from some of their belongings. The crops represent a series of growth, charts resembling the heights of children demarcated on walls. A single mother, a secret illegitimate child, “sister turned mother/mother, in fact, grandmother.” p. 59). In its stead, she makes secrecy her sister (p. 62).  The bloated belly of Venus (“Sacred Sex”), but “Wind Whispers.” (“In The Grasslands”, p. 64) 

Compare “Specimens From The Abbey 2002” with “Coming To: St. Peter’s Abbey, 2004”, and “Mediations on Her Body: St. Peter’s Abbey, 2004”.  In deed and word,

Swatches of her life,
this old piece, her wrinkling body,
a life’s work, the paper trail.

(p. 65)

Playing cards turn Tarot and totemic, her father’s face a litany of fires past, while

While she, first-born daughter,

relegated to the woman’s realm to
cook and clean, hoe and weed,
tend children, gather eggs.

(“Heart Attack”, p. 69)

She observes “The Owl-eyed Goddess”, from “the kitchen I called home”; but “white/mares lead a silver chariot/to light and sky”. By “piercing illusions and making a better world.

The Great Mother reappears (“Clitoris: Her Story”. The psychomachia of “Breathing Space”, and misogynistic taunts (“My Place”) recede, to make way for the concrete poem, a butterfly unfurled onto the page, as a final and flush-centric poem, 

Let the love-whisper
     of the creek lull you
          into presence.

(“So Much You Love This”, p. 78)

Bernadette Wagner organized the popular panel on Mothering for the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets. She authors multiple blogs on women’s issues and political activism.

Anne Burke

Review of An Autoerotic History of Swings, by Patricia Young (Sono Nis Press, 2010) 80 pp. paper $14.95; The Blackbird Must Be, by Dorothy Field (Sono Nis Press, 2010) 100 p. paper $14.95; Nobody Move, by Susan Stenson (Sono Nis, 2010) 80 pp. $14.95.

Sono Nis Press, based in Winlaw, British Columbia, is celebrating forty-two years of publishing in Canada.

In approaching this triad of poetry titles, I want to borrow a trope from one of Susan Stenson’s poems, “Reader Response Theory”, since the poem is emblematic of experience through multiple lenses over time.  A literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value.  Rather, a continuing dialogue or dialectic exists between a text and successive readers.  An ever-necessary retelling is required, since the narrative is cumulatively interpreted and assessed, with successive generations.  See: also Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (1982) and The Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (1982) by Jauss; Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (1984). Cited in A Glossary of Literary Terms 7th Edition, by M. H. Abrams, (Orlando: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1981) pp. 262-3.  (Also see: concepts proposed by Hans-Georg Gadmer, under interpretation and hermeneutics, pp. 128-132).

What is primary is not the response of a single reader at a given time, but reflection on the altering responses, interpretive and evaluative, of the general reading public over the course of time.  According to Hans Robert Jauss in “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”, in New Literary History, volume 2, 1970-1, a text has no objective meaning, but it does contain a variety of objectively describable features.  A particular response will become a joint product of a reader’s own expectations, when challenged by the texts.  Therein develops an evolving historical tradition of critical interpretations and evaluations.   

Which brings me to “Mass bird deaths a mystery, but not a sign of ‘aflockalypse’”, by Alister Doyle, with files from Agence France-Presse, (Calgary Herald, January 7, 2022, A13)

[R]esponse to the bird deaths also illustrated differences between more religious-minded Americans, versed in biblical accounts of plagues of frogs or locusts, and    secular Swedes who place their trust in human authority.  [T]he reaction is, “oh no, Doomsday is coming.” In Sweden, they say, “Let’s call the veterinary          authorities.”

As I write, fireworks may have caused the deaths of more than 5,000 birds on New Year’s Eve.  More research is needed because science is reportedly struggling to explain surprises that nature can bring.  When birds are falling out of the sky, storms, hail or lightning can kill birds, while tornadoes or waterspouts can suck them up and drop them far away.  Human causes, such as fireworks, power lines, or a collision with a truck, may explain avian deaths.

Poetry and Canadian Poetry and, more recently, Canadian Poetry, are rapt/wrapped by nature.  The humanist/environmentalist viewpoint/vantage point appears throughout Christine Lowther’s recent My Nature (Leaf Press, 2010). Don McKay, a birding naturalist, exemplifies an ornithological orientation.  Birds have figured in prophecy, as in the nightingale, or Poe’s “The Raven”; foretelling a death in the house, incantatory.

The first book An Auto-Erotic History of Swings is by Patricia Young; and the other two, the blackbird must be, by Dorothy Field and Nobody Move, by Susan Stenson, are books which Young edited, in some form, for the press.

Young writes of “the mad chirping/in the underbrush” (p. 73) and “hollow balls the size of pigeons’ eggs” women insert into their vaginas (“Brass Eggs”, p. 57).  Although “Not a birdwatcher”, (“The Littlest Orgasm”), p. 48, she must nevertheless note: “The Sexual Significance of Birds”: “The bird, for instance, that changes into a woman while retaining some elements of the bird”.

Her red feet and plump chest
more alluring
than the smell of fermenting mash.
You, a predator?
You, who long to roll in her grasses?
You chase after your game bird, grabbing at tail

feathers, but she lifts off the ground...

where she perches
in the heavenly vapours.  Strange
popping sounds, derisive laugher, your partridge
love drowning in a vat of bubbling corn mash.

(p. 34)

The title poem deals with Samoan culture (Margaret Meade) and the practice of masturbation by hanging.  The aim is to be historically and geographically varied about taboos: the dildo, masturbation, prostitution and concubines; puberty, menstruation, and marriage; (Freudian) childhood sexuality.

 The term “auto-erotic” suggests self-propelling sexual gratification or arising without known external stimulation.  The term “swing” operates on multiple levels: a) the gamut of emotions the poet feels and conveys to the reader (to intrigue, amuse, amaze, outrage, move, or inspire); b) to shift and fluctuate, for example among sexual partners; and c) to move rhythmically in place (the acts of love).

Young acknowledges that the book owes a debt to Havelock Ellis and his six-volume, thirty-one-year project, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1887-1928). She has “lifted quotations” that engendered a variety of emotions and the quotations may be woven into the poems.  A quotation “triggered” the poem or she sought a quotation after composing a poem. Some of the first section “The Art of Love” was short-listed in the 2010 CBC literary competition.

The second section about Karita “again” is a subtitle used to suggest redundancy (from her viewpoint and that of her sister) on the occasions of a marriage party and  a sex addict at a motel;  the history of rape (not herstory).   Listing-making is not only a practice, 2008 for grocery shopping (“Sex: Reasons for Having It”).  There is the cautionary tale of Marital Preparation, (in “Questions to Ask Before Marriage: Tofino, B.C.”)

Are there things you’re not prepared to give up—
arbutus trunks, quails thrashing through
salal outside your kitchen door?

                                    (p. 73)

The wish of “I wanted to experience God, sidle up to the Divine” (“Sex: Reasons for Having It”, p. 78) becomes the gateway to the third section and final long poem, “On Sex and Wooden Boats: God’s Last Words”, exploring the biblical Creation Myth.

Young has nine collections of poetry and one of short fiction.  She has won numerous awards, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, the Dorothy Livesay Award, the Bliss Carmen Award, and the National Magazine Award, among them. Two of her poetry books were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award.

Dorothy Field, who has a new collection of poems, is a writer and visual artist.  She reveals, “When I’m writing I feel like I’m not getting to my visual art.  When I’m more engaged in visual art, I feel I’m not getting to my writing.” (“poet Q & A”).  She has two previous poetry books, Wearing My People like a Shawl (Sono Nis Press, 2008) and Leaving the Narrow Place (Oolichan Books, 2004).  She is the author of a children’s book and co-author of Between Gardens, a book of garden letters (Polestar, 1999).  The fact that she lived on a small farm on rural Vancouver Island for thirty years and then moved to Victoria is relevant to an understanding of her odyssey which she charts in this collection. .The Cover art/image is also by Field

She unflinchingly inspects incest (“Denial”) and infidelity (“No Fit Witness”).  The journaling is logged on The Day of the Dead, marking time.  She records domestic details of making and unmaking the marital bed.  In parallel poems, of he said, and she said, the poet consciously lists “What he wants from her” and “What she wants from him”.

What matters more than this is what it means to be a woman (“Copper Woman” was inspired by Anne Cameron’s “Daughters Of Copper Woman”).  The word “yakshi” is for a fertile voluptuous female being. As for monogamy, the poet praises the mated pairing of Mr. and Mrs. Bird, while another pair is god-like (“Orpheus and Eurydice”).  Field is fond of the metaphysical conceit á la John Donne, in “Used”).  She discovers and uncovers the ending of a marriage through divorce (“And Then It’s Over”).  The sense of
abandonment is part of the grieving process.  That and

Not knowing the women
who dropped me
had taken up
with you.

                        (“Master”, p. 28)

Further, the meaning of land (“Real Estate”) pertains to the sale of the farm, a painful separation of assets, which is nothing in comparison with her refusal to cede control.

The healing process seems to begin with “This morning the Garry Oak (p. 40)

The city thinks this oak is mine.
It stands on land beside my house
but an oak cannot be bought or sold.
If I slip, claim ownership,
forgive me my trespass.

(“Sangha of Oaks”, p. 47)

This is decidedly preferable to a desolate wasteland of emotion, “coyote-rimmed (“Night Calls”), and frigid relations (“Marriage in the Ice Age”).

The motif of birds (their sexual significance and transformation into women, by Young),
is connected with Field’s book epitaph, from Wallace Stevens, “The river is moving. /The blackbird must be flying”.

The subject of the opening poem is a red-winged blackbird (“When I Was Just Flesh”).  Throughout, we find the Raven, a dark cloud of crows, a city hawk, as omens, totemic emblems.  A hummingbird “beating herself against the skylight” is one with whom she identifies, as trapped, and whom she releases “at least once every summer” (“Closing and Opening” p. 33).  There is the narrative of Tiresias of Thebes, who was turned by the goddess Hera into a woman; he came to understand birdsong. 

Section Two is dedicated to an oak tree on her property which had to be removed.  In turn, she mourns its loss, in mythological symbolism, drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain contexts; Tibetan and Sanskrit texts; the Mother Goddess in Nepal and Sedna a goddess of the Inuit.

Her art is telling stories, a survivor of divorce (but just barely).

Stenson’s new collection is witty, soulful, and inventive.  She engages the reader’s reception of the text; offering her own “take” on the altering responses, interpretive and evaluative, of the general reading public over time. Accordingly, she opines on Irving Layton’s solipsism, “Lovers and Lesser Men”, and on “Husbands”, “It isn’t easy remembering your husband’s name.” (p. 22).  In addition to a cataloguing of possibles, she writes these precious lines: “men in poems are much harder to see”, in “Reader Response Theory”, (p. 52) and “Some girls whistle with no fingers.  I need four”, in “All Risk Factors Taken into Account”, (p. 69.).  She adds, “My husband started writing poetry/when his car ran out of gas on the valley road, in “Aubade for the Valley”, (p. 73)

Patriarchy hinges on the conditional, “But if he proposes” and/ she accepts”, returning to “But, he does not propose,” (“Prayer”, p. 86)

The ever-present and prescient birds, their significance is evident in the final section entitled “Everyday Fools And Birds”, for example, a species, so aptly named, in “Devotion”,

a hummingbird showers in the spray
as if the bird made the decision to visit now…

one bird, this small song:
how he hovers.

                                    (p. 81)

Post-war, men gone to war and women waiting, in “The Diviner”,

My grandmother was always tired.
Twelve kids.  A depression. Two wars.”

(p. 61) 

Some compositions and collages are actually prose poems, scanning margin-to-margin, but all replete with the gift of story-telling, whether dealing with infidelity, loss, or leaving/leave-taking in human relationships.  Like Don McKay, who provided a quotation: “And so the watcher throws himself into l’envers”, Stenson opts for
onomatopoeia, and declares that “a bird’s all wings” (“Certainty”, p. 88).

Stenson has won numerous awards, including the Rona Murray Prize for Literature, Monday Magazine’s People’s Choice Award for Best Book of Poetry, and the Hawthorne Poetry Award.  She also won the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry contest and she co-publishes The Claremont Review.  Two of her previous book publications are: Could Love a Man (Sono Nis, 2001) and My Mother Agrees with the Dead (Wolsak and Wynn, 2007).  She also contributed to Threshold: Six Women, Six Poets (Sono Nis, 1998).

Anne Burke