Washita: New Poems<\/i>
\nby Patrick Lane
\nToronto: Harbour Publishing, 2014
\n80 pp. $18.95<\/p>\n
In his latest collection, Patrick Lane explores familiar territory through the lyric poem, but the whole book is tinged with a recognition of the changes that come with ageing. One of predominate motifs is dust, and Lane suggests that dust is what comes from life. The tone is pensive as Lane ranges through nature, poetry, family, and time.<\/p>\n
The poems are arranged alphabetically by title, from \u201cArroyo\u201d to \u201cWishing Not To Be Aloof Like Stone,\u201d with an irregular number of poems for various letters. The words of the titles may or may not appear in the poems, so the titles may have been created to fit the order in the book as there is a hint of movement in the poems that goes beyond simply reading the pages in sequence. As expected, the natural world infuses the poems with a solidity while at the same time demonstrating the constant flux of life. <\/p>\n
A \u201cwashita\u201d is a sharpening stone, and these poems feel like stones against which life is sharpened. The words are like blades slicing through perceptions and questions. The word \u201cwashita\u201d is used in \u201cSwarf,\u201d and this poem integrates two of the main concerns of the collection: Lane\u2019s father, who suffered from silicosis, and Lane\u2019s own increasing blindness. By reading into the past, the poems develop continuity while also increasing the sense of loss, both past and present. <\/p>\n
Most of the poems are less than one page, usually around 13 lines. The longest poem is 34 lines, and it has the longest title: \u201cThe Unbearable Beauty of Despair Albert Camus Wrote of in his Last Nights.\u201d Lane writes of his parents and the power of story. He imagines his mother bathing his ailing father while the son is a baby in a drawer: \u201cand though this is a story I have imagined again, \/ one I have told over and over until it has become a song \/ that has invaded me, the words repeating inside me, \/ it is the first where I\u2019ve placed my father in the corrugated washtub and my mother \/ washing him [ . . . ].\u201d Such tenderness infuses the poems but they are also full of shock and pain. In \u201cInformis,\u201d a boy earns money by putting his hand in an ant\u2019s nest: \u201cI stood aside as the men from the highway crew watched his flesh \/ become another thing, a red swarm screaming.\u201d Pain and decay reside with beauty, may even create it. <\/p>\n
That the book was written at all is something of a miracle as Lane endured frozen shoulder and was unable to type win his usual one-finger, right-hand manner. That he has done so much with one finger is incredible but to have to switch to his left hand, a process he describes in the Afterword as \u201cexcruciatingly slow.\u201d But the slowness opens him to possibilities mediated by time and the process becomes \u201cexquisite, each letter, each word, and each line meditations rare and beautiful.\u201d <\/p>\n
The method of production matches the results. <\/p>\n
\nLake of Two Mountains<\/i>
\nby Arleen Par\u00e9
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2014
\n84 pages, $20.00<\/p>\n
Lake of Two Mountains<\/i> by Arleen Par\u00e9 won the 2014 Governor General\u2019s Award for Poetry. It\u2019s Par\u00e9\u2019s second collection, and it\u2019s a beautifully connected group of poems that deals with a particular place: land and water between the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence. Par\u00e9 combines personal family experience with geology and history in a variety of styles to create an incisive and sensitive book. <\/p>\n
The physical location is described with precise detail. The diction is rich with the specificity of names: \u201corange hawkweed, mulberry, \/ milkweed, [and] purple vetch\u201d (\u201cUnder Influence\u201d) or \u201corthic, melanic, brunisol soil\u201d (\u201cCall and Response\u201d). At the centre is the lake, and Par\u00e9 creates its history in \u201cBecoming Lake\u201d: \u201cStart early. Pleistocene. \/ 3 a.m. Let the Laurentide Ice Shield \/ wrench surface snow, blast \/ great pans of pale frozen foam.\u201d In this poem, the lake is alive, the landscape wondrously creating itself into lake and mountains.<\/p>\n
But the poems are move out from an appreciation of the purely physical to the land\u2019s interaction with human beings. Tragic confrontation is explored in poems such as \u201cKahnesatake\u201d and \u201cOka Crisis.\u201d Life in a religious cloister is explored in a series of seven numbered prose poems titled \u201cMonastic Life\u201d and five titled \u201cFr\u00e8re Gabriel\u2019s Life.\u201d And threads of these poems come together in \u201cMonastic Lake\u201d: \u201cLiturgical in its way, the lake unfolds, arising in wavelets in morning, changing with weather or time of day, without evidence of sorrow or blame.\u201d 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 fianc\u00e9e who marries while he is fighting in the Second World War (\u201cUncle Bobby\u201d) and \u201cIn How Mend the Years,\u201d he sits on the beach and \u201cspools thin lines of bliss \/ as if fishing \/ hitching this place to the quiet \/ promise of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s remarkable how the poems work individually and collectively. Patterns of imagery reveal themselves in Par\u00e9\u2019s sombre, measured lines. The poems reflect each other the way the surface of the lake reflects the sky. In \u201cWhen Heat Falls,\u201d a basic cycle of life is life identified on a hot summer day: \u201cThe shoreline slowly recedes, \/ beginning to shrink, the lake rising \/ in droplets, almost nothingness, \/ on its way into the sky.\u201d The oppressive heat of the day turns into an opportunity for contemplation of existence.<\/p>\n
The physical world is where we live whether we notice it or not. Arleen Par\u00e9 goes beyond noticing to understanding and celebrating this particular landscape in richly textured poems. And that\u2019s the gift of this book.<\/p>\n
\nPrairie Ostrich<\/i>
\nby Tamai Kobayashi,
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 200 pages, $19.95
\nISBN: 9-780864-926807<\/p>\n
Egg Murakami, a precocious eight-year-old, struggles to make sense of a world gone awry in Tamai Kobayashi\u2019s first novel, Prairie Ostrich<\/i>. Not only does Egg have to cope with being bullied at school, but also she has to face a family in pieces after the death of her older brother, Albert. The Murakami family has an ostrich farm, and that\u2019s not the only thing that separates them from their neighbours in Bittercreek, Alberta. They are the sole Japanese family for miles, and it\u2019s 1974. Prejudice flourishes. <\/p>\n
In her grief, Egg\u2019s mother attempts to find solace in alcohol, and her father has moved into the barn. Kathy, Egg\u2019s seventeen-year-old sister, tries to look out for her, but Kathy has some serious challenges of her own as she\u2019s in love with her friend Stacey and wants to leave home as soon as possible. <\/p>\n
Kobayashi gives Egg some help apart from her sister: the girl loves to read, and her school librarian, Evangeline, a young woman with her own secrets, provides some respite for Egg, allowing her to use the library as a refuge. Fiction plays a huge role in Egg\u2019s life, in particular Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/i> and Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl<\/i>, which Kathy reads to Egg\u2014with altered endings. <\/p>\n
The novel is told in third-person, focussed on Egg and how she thinks. The child\u2019s perspective is a powerful tool for seeing the world, and as Egg is so smart, the point of view does not feel limited. Rather, the view from an eight-year-old, admittedly an immensely perceptive one, illuminates aspects that adults may miss. <\/p>\n
One of the main strengths of the novel is an excellent sense of place and time. References to popular culture abound: The Six Million Dollar Man<\/i> and Mutual of Omaha\u2019s Wild Kingdom<\/i> and pop music figure largely in Egg\u2019s life. She is captivated by science, and her curiosity compels her to try to understand things, some she cannot because she is too young. But even in the months of the novel\u2019s setting, we see her gather information and start to piece together the tragedy of her brother\u2019s death and the truth of what really happened. <\/p>\n
The symbolism in the novel may be a bit overdone, the name \u201cEgg,\u201d for example, or \u201cBittercreek,\u201d but Kobayashi does an excellent job of creating a child\u2019s world and showing how a child understands both more and less than many people assume. And the overall theme in strong: loneliness afflicts everyone on some level, and the novel makes a strong case for the alleviation of suffering through love. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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