Writings / Reviews: Candace Fertile

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Lake of Two Mountains
by Arleen Paré
London, ON: Brick Books, 2014
84 pages, $20.00

Lake of Two Mountains by Arleen Paré won the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. It’s Paré’s second collection, and it’s a beautifully connected group of poems that deals with a particular place: land and water between the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence. Paré combines personal family experience with geology and history in a variety of styles to create an incisive and sensitive book.

The physical location is described with precise detail. The diction is rich with the specificity of names: “orange hawkweed, mulberry, / milkweed, [and] purple vetch” (“Under Influence”) or “orthic, melanic, brunisol soil” (“Call and Response”). At the centre is the lake, and Paré creates its history in “Becoming Lake”: “Start early. Pleistocene. / 3 a.m. Let the Laurentide Ice Shield / wrench surface snow, blast / great pans of pale frozen foam.” In this poem, the lake is alive, the landscape wondrously creating itself into lake and mountains.

But the poems are move out from an appreciation of the purely physical to the land’s interaction with human beings. Tragic confrontation is explored in poems such as “Kahnesatake” and “Oka Crisis.” Life in a religious cloister is explored in a series of seven numbered prose poems titled “Monastic Life” and five titled “Frère Gabriel’s Life.” And threads of these poems come together in “Monastic Lake”: “Liturgical in its way, the lake unfolds, arising in wavelets in morning, changing with weather or time of day, without evidence of sorrow or blame.” The lake and its surroundings provide a calm place away from an often painful human world. For example, an uncle sustains the loss of a fiancée who marries while he is fighting in the Second World War (“Uncle Bobby”) and “In How Mend the Years,” he sits on the beach and “spools thin lines of bliss / as if fishing / hitching this place to the quiet / promise of peace.”

It’s remarkable how the poems work individually and collectively. Patterns of imagery reveal themselves in Paré’s sombre, measured lines. The poems reflect each other the way the surface of the lake reflects the sky. In “When Heat Falls,” a basic cycle of life is life identified on a hot summer day: “The shoreline slowly recedes, / beginning to shrink, the lake rising / in droplets, almost nothingness, / on its way into the sky.” The oppressive heat of the day turns into an opportunity for contemplation of existence.

The physical world is where we live whether we notice it or not. Arleen Paré goes beyond noticing to understanding and celebrating this particular landscape in richly textured poems. And that’s the gift of this book.

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