“Time After Time”
by Gaye Smith
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-927756-49-2
Before I even opened Time After Time, a colouring book (for
mature colourers) by Lipton SK artist and all-round creative powerhouse Gaye
Smith, I did some internet research. That may seem strange, for here I was
about to review a book without text …shouldn’t it be, like, easy-peasy? I was
vaguely aware that adult colouring books had become a hot new phenomenon, and I
wanted to know why.
Turns out it’s about de-stressing. What
I learned is that like reading, or doing jigsaw puzzles, or knitting, when we
focus on the activity of colouring it calms the mind and takes our focus away
from worries, while simultaneously stimulating motor skills, senses, and
creativity. There’s a crossover
with mindfulness and mantras: “Activities in which the brain is engaged just
enough to stop it whirring, but not so much that the concentration is draining.”
(The Guardian)
The writer of a June 2015 article (in The Guardian) reported that “Five of
Amazon’s top 10 last week were adult colouring-in books, as were six of
Brazil’s top 10 non-fiction list. Last year in France, the combined
colouring-in industry sold 3.5m books.” Apparently it’s a universal phenomenon,
captivating folks from all walks of life. Psychologists are studying it. An
Algerian doctor stated that colouring books helped him lick severe depression.
They’re huge in China. There are Facebook sites dedicated to this. Apps. And
there are intricately-designed books galore.
Would Smith’s Time After Time meet the unspoken promise to keep me in a calm,
focused zone? I opened the softcover (approximately 9 x 12”) and was bedazzled.
Many of the images, including the cover image, depict a fantastical landscape
with water; hills; ringed cones (trees); flowers; insects; hobbit-type homes; all-sorts-ish
candy; and creatures, all graphically designed with swirls, stripes, dots,
circles, checks, and squiggles (this sounds like a children’s poem). I can
imagine the fun she had creating these images, and wonder if she imagined the adults who might take
felt pen to paper and fill in the blanks while the prescient concerns of their
worlds melted away like ice cream.
There are twenty-four images (not
counting covers, inside and out) to play with, and each graphic faces a blank
page. My favourites are the full-bleed candy page-perhaps because it brings
back memories of when my parents hosted card games in their smalltown SK homes
and served all-sorts candy-and the dragonfly page.
I can certainly admire the art, but now
it’s time to put the efficacy of “colouring as a means to lessening stress” to
work. Will I feel calmer? Like a child again? I search my desk, my junk drawer:
no markers or pencil crayons! And the work is too fine to attempt with wax
crayons. Well, I’m all out of Big Girl things like butter and eggs, so a trip
to the store is called for. While there, I’m going to swing down the stationary
aisle, grab a full pack of fine-tipped markers, because to be honest, I can’t
wait to try this out.
__________
“Exile on a Grid Road”
by Shelley Banks
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$12.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-057-3
Robins, grackles, gulls, airport snow
geese, a Great Horned Owl, iconic chick-a-dees that eat peanuts from the palm
of a hand, pigeons, Ruby-throated hummingbirds in bougainvillea. Birds flutter
in and out of Exile on a Grid Road by
longtime Regina writer and photographer Shelley Banks. In her inaugural poetry
collection, the multi-genre scribe demonstrates that she’s also paid attention
to dogs and cats, insects, rain, the myriad plants (“natives and exotics”) that
grow alongside gravel roads, and, of course, to the human heart.
Why is this all important? Because life
whizzes by, and most of us don’t take the time to stop and consider how a
grasshopper resembles a twig on a patio gate, or how-on a grave or anywhere
else in a certain season-“lumps of clay jut\through the snow”. This is the very
stuff of life; it counterbalances the tedium of work-a-day lives, the horrors
of cancer and chemotherapy, the shadows that deaths leave behind. It’s good and
necessary to celebrate what goes on beneath the glossy surface of life, and that’s what poets like Banks do so well.
The finely-tuned poems in this book are
mostly short, and Banks has employed various styles: free verse, quatrains,
couplets, haiku, a prose poem, a pantoum, concrete poetry, and even a found
poem, “Swordfish,” “from text describing complex patterns in number puzzles
from an online Sudoku Guide.” This diversity might signal that some of these
pieces were written while the writer was in a poetry class, or perhaps she just
enjoys the freedom of experimentation. The variety is aesthetically appealing,
as is the range in subject matter.
“Greed” is among the poet’s many considerations.
An octogenarian is greedy for “dregs of wine, the last peanut skins,” and Banks
examines the greediness of the photographer who’s compelled to “capture” the
image of an owl and satisfy her “need not to believe\but prove this presence”.
She continues:
and the memory of the great
owl’s soaring grace
flounders in desire,
reduced
to just another checklist photo
lost.
Banks is competent in the mechanics of
poetry. Note that in the above excerpt (from “Raw Desire”) she’s placed
“reduced” and “lost” on their own. This gives these words more weight, so they
reverberate and meaning is heightened. Great care’s also taken with line breaks
in this collection: end-line words “swing” backward and forward, giving lines
double meaning and impact. Phrases like “the clouds slate\submarines patrolling
the horizon” and “a galaxy of farms” demonstrate originality and grace.
The “bird-stained window” in “The
Strike Drags On” is, for this reader, an ideal metaphor for this accomplished collection.
The poet is an acute observer (the window), who records and shares personal
observations and experiences in poems that sometimes whisper, sometimes sing,
and sometimes howl. Yes, there are “stains,” and that’s the reality of anyone’s
flight through this world, but there is also joy, and praise .. for the
moments, for oranges, for snow melt, and “one light\far off\along the wingtip”.
These are poems to let steep, and read
again.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Let Us Be True”
by Erna Buffie
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-781550-506358
The unceasing mystery of “family” is at
the heart of many a novel, and in Let Us
Be True, Manitoba-based Erna Buffie employs a variety of characters to
explore this complex subject across generations. When one considers how we
often hurt those closest to us-including our kin-it’s easy to question whether blood
is indeed thicker than water.
Buffie kicks this novel off on a WW2
battlefield. Henry’s a young soldier who doesn’t regret the death of his
hometown comrade, as it frees up that soldier’s girl. He knows that Pearl
“won’t be an easy woman to love, but he can’t think of anything else he would
rather do.” In the chapters that follow-and through the voices of her two adult
daughters and others-we learn that Henry pegged it: foul-mouthed, sour, and
seemingly heartless, Pearl’s a difficult woman to like, let alone love.
In chapter two we meet the force that
is Pearl Calder. Now seventy-four, she’s clearing out anything extraneous after
Henry’s death, including items others might keep for sentimental reasons. Good
details here help us understand these characters, ie: Henry kept a Tony the
Tiger glass collection. “He’d collected with every refill at the Esso station,
the one where he’d worked for more than thirty-five years.” And how about this
for Pearl’s telephone answering machine message: “Is this thing working, Henry?
Henry! Oh, hell, just leave us a message and I’ll try to figure it out.” Hilarious.
Early on, Pearl’s discarding her dresses:
“They didn’t fit any more. Size twelve. When was the last time she’d seen a
size twelve? The last time one of the girls got married, and it had taken her
twelve months of dieting to get there. And for what? Two divorces, one right
after the other, and two mother-of-the-bride dresses she’d never wear again.” I
love the realism in this.
Clearly, Pearl’s not close to her
girls, and they’re not close to each other. Darlene’s a university professor in
a relationship with Athena. Pearl believes this “silly ass” elder daughter
“could use a bit of lightening up”. (Pearl’s especially fond of describing
people and things as “silly”). The crotchety protagonist attacks her other
daughter, Carol, for her pride in her fancy house, where she lives “with her
two spoiled sons and that bland, blond-haired milquetoast she’d married.”
Pearl mostly communicates via rant,
whereas Henry, the daughters’ favourite, was much softer. She admits that she
had “spent quite a bit of their married life shouting nasty things at Henry
....” Her place was for “bitching and scolding,” while Henry was for “fun and
play.”
There are several twists and turns,
shadows and secrets in Buffie’s debut book. Does Pearl’s dark history justify
her coldness? Does she have any redeeming qualities? And how much do our parents’
experiences impact upon the adults we
become?
In life there are always more questions
than answers. Let Us Be True is a
book that lays it all out, and leaves it up to readers to make their own
judgements.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Love is Not Anonymous”
by Jan Wood
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$12.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-056-6
It’s a happy coincidence when a poet’s
name reflects one of his or her subjects. As I read Love is Not Anonymous, one of four books released as part of
Thistledown Press’s 12th New Leaf Editions Series, I discovered that Jan Wood
is an example of this synergy. Wood calls Big River SK home–anyone who knows
this heavily-treed area will understand the name\leitmotif connection-and while
the book’s back cover blurb addresses the poet’s handling of love,
relationships and spirituality, I keep returning to the poems that indirectly
honour the natural world.
Among these is “Awakening,” where the
narrator’s night-driving on a rain-slick road, and “at the edge of the
swamp-spruce” a bull moose appears. Though the poet tries to capture a decent
photograph where “the Northern Saskatchewan forest\intertwines with moose,
muskeg and sky,” her “Details of the night are\a thousand apertures and
nothing”. She becomes philosophical in the final stanza, and it’s this
layering-the real world of a bridge and rain and headlights juxtaposed against
what it may all mean in the big
picture-that marks this poem a success.
Clumsily human, I teeter
on the edge of oneness
slow my breath until
the beauty I behold can bear my weight.
More evidence of Wood’s fine way with
the natural world is revealed in metaphors and personification. “Ringed moon in
a January sky\a pale tambourine,” she writes in “Elle”. In “Dangerous as
Whiskey,” which I’m assuming to be a spring poem, “water has its hands all
over\the morning” and “night drips with a language\that it dares not speak.”
Sometimes there’s a confluence of natural and religious images, as in this
dandy from “communion”: “on Sundays a week’s supply of holy\melts on
her tongue like a snowflake”. This, friends, is first-rate poetry.
I know the poet’s doing her job when
she writes so evocatively of winter I find myself missing the snow and engaging
in prairie-type activities, like skating. Wood’s poem “Skating in the Exit
Light” features a twelve-year-old girl and a boy she’s interested in sneaking
into the rink to steal some alone time-and figure eights-on the ice.
In several of these poems we’re given
the poetic outline of an event and are called upon to use our imaginations to
fill in the details. Some are more forthcoming, like “Duplex,” with its theme
of domestic abuse. For those new to reading poetry, I advise reading the back
cover copy and perhaps the publisher’s online notes (if available) about the
work before beginning a book; poetry is often spare, and the aforementioned
texts can provide helpful hints on the content.
Finally, a word about this book’s gorgeous
cover. The photograph of a female statue (perhaps representative of the
biblical Mary?) among red-berried conifers could be enough to make anyone grab this book off a shelf. I
hope you do just that.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
