“Pitchblende”
By Elise Marcella Godfrey
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-780889-778405
I didn’t know what pitchblende was before I read Elise Marcella Godfrey’s same-named poetry collection, but I certainly do now. To shortcut, merriam-webster.com describes pitchblende as “a brown to black mineral that consists of massive uraninite, has a distinctive luster, contains radium, and is the chief ore-mineral source of uranium”. It’s a measure of the poet how Godfrey takes this radioactive by-product of uranium ore—and the capitalist/colonialist/mostly male culture surrounding its extraction and usage—and transforms it into a finely-tuned collection of political, environmental, and investigative poetry.
Godfrey writes from “the traditional and unceded land of the QayQayt First Nation” on Vancouver Island, and this well-researched, multi-voiced collection exhibits a deep caring for the earth and its peoples. Her cry is clear: “the neocolonical machine … promotes profit and industry at the expense of community and sustainability.”
Pitchblende does not read like a first book. Godfrey’s a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan and her work’s appeared in journals and anthologies: she’s put in the literary leg work, and it shows. These poems are saturated with internal and off-rhymes rhymes—ie: “Mine and refinery,” “Throwing off gamma rays, errant vibrations/that penetrate in waves,” and “Ancient dust from dying stars. Excision sites, scars”—and the precise language of mining and the boreal world, ie: “Blueberry, cloudberry, bearberry, mossberry./Juniper. Currant. Indigo/milk caps, morels, chanterelles. Wild rice. Lichens.” I appreciate the mouth-watering language of science, too: “Fungus forms/mycological rhizomes,/foliose, fruticose, squamulose/lobes and crustose structures.” Ironic how what sounds so pretty—"milky green water, as if golden moonglow lichen/crushed and glittered into it”—illustrates such ecological devastation.
The poems appear in various forms but most notable are the erasure poems. Godfrey wrote the collection “after reading testimonies given at public hearings held throughout Saskatchewan in 1993 on the territories of Treaties 4, 6, 8 and 10.” These hearings’ transcripts—from mining industry representatives; biologists; a male-exclusive, federally-appointed panel; Indigenous Elders; and “a united group of women (who were white settlers)” are archived, and Godfrey “adapted sections of testimony, while also writing poems triggered by their content and related research.” The erasure poems spotlight distinct words which graphically explode across the page, often with just one or two words on a line, and much space around them. There’s abundant alliteration throughout, and even onomatopoeia (“Read the radiograph,/its staccato syntax scrambled”).
Several poems are written in a speaker’s voice, ie: “Elder’s Testimony” at Hatchet Lake: “Caribou still come south/but the government tells us we can’t eat the kidneys/heavy with metals: cadmium, polonium, cesium, lead./The government says it’s okay to eat the liver.” A Black Lake Elder’s concerns—“We’re worried uranium will ruin our water”—are contrasted against Uraneco’s response—“If anything, the region will be cleaner after we leave.” Call-and-response; it’s highly effective.
This daring poet puts a finger on the pulse of a hurting earth, where humans “crack the ancient world’s ribs/for one last gasp” and “Our sun is set to swallow us.” Powerful, and true.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Bread and Water”
By dee Hobsbawn-Smith
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$26.95
ISBN 9-780889-778115
I know dee Hobsbawn-Smith as a multi-genre writer, chef, yogi, runner, mother, and yes, as a friend. She and husband Dave Margoshes hosted me for a reading at their ancestral rural home (“The Dogpatch”) near Saskatoon years ago, and when dee was touring a poetry collection on Vancouver Island, I welcomed her at my place. “I’ll cook for you,” she said, “using whatever you have in the house.” I’m was embarrassed by my uninspired inventory, yet she whipped a brilliant meal together with my mundane larder. One doesn’t forget that.
So yes, I know this dexterous writer, and expected a great read in her essay collection, Bread & Water. The text behind the gorgeously apropos cover photograph—a chunk of homemade bread and a glass of water—is wide-ranging, provocative, and, like that heel of bread, hearty. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d admire these lyrical essays which took me back to the Dogpatch, but also to Vancouver, Comox, and the waters off Vancouver Island; to dee’s Calgary home, restaurants, and the 2013 flood in that city; to Fernie; and to France, where the author trained to be a chef. (Her upbringing in an RCAF family—“part of a gypsy air force brood”—prepared her for frequent moves in adulthood.)
And yes, these essays concern food, food culture, the restaurant industry, locavorism, gardens, farmers’ markets, preserving, and even the import of using appropriate knives, but I’d argue they give equal space to Hobsbawn-Smith’s observance of and appreciation for the wondrous natural world.
The Dogpatch and surrounding property deserve mention, as where we write influences the what and how. When Hobsbawn-Smith arrived from Alberta, leaving her career as a chef and food writer behind in favour of literary endeavours, she found “Every building and field [was] crammed with broken and corroding evidence of three generations.” She wondered: “How does a writer find what lies within when the roof leaks?” Yet when she looked out her window, she saw “The red sun rising. Three deer scudding across the south pasture through the hay bales” and “Chickadees, snug in their little black bonnets. Words that sort themselves into a resonant voice.” The land flooded and a spontaneous lake appeared. She writes: “A large part of my enjoyment is the auditory experience of life beside a lake: the thrumming of frogs; the lilting melody of chickadees and meadowlarks; the hummingbirds’ whirring wings” and “the geese honking as they arrive and leave like metronomes each spring and fall; coyotes carolling each evening.”
Here’s wisdom: “Food and cooking are complicated snapshots of our culture.” The author demonstrates this. And praises spring vegetables: “Asparagus was hope made tangible, spears spun from fragile ferns and sunshine after winter’s absolutist mineral-fed root vegetables.” She “carried home a bunch of living watercress like a bouquet.”
“In cooking, we express our deepest feelings about the nature of the universe, our deepest faith and connection to all that is primal and irresistible.” I’ll tell you what’s irresistible—this delicious book.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Girl running”
By Diana Hope Tegenkamp
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-214-0
When a veteran multi-disciplinary artist
pens a poetry collection, it’s likely that the influence of her other art practices
will seep into the pages and make for an original read. This is evidenced in
the case of Diana Hope Tegenkamp, a Saskatoon-based poet who also works with
film, photography, visual and performance art, sound and music. In her debut poetry
book, Girl running, Tegenkamp’s 23-page poem incorporates various fonts,
strike-outs, quotations, footnotes, and superimposed text across a “mountain-like
shape” which is “an outline of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic,” and the
entire long poem is a conversational response to an 1809 textbook (Letters
on Ancient History, by Anne Wilson). So interesting, and so are the questions
it poses about history and subjectivity. “History, a whirlpool,32/sucking
in obscure circumstances/with a frightful noise.33”
Tegenkamp also eludes to sculpture, novels, paintings and films, ie: director Jane Campion’s adaptation of “Portrait of a Lady,” and there’s a poetic close-up of a poignant scene from “Boys Don’t Cry,” the 1999 Academy Award-winning movie concerning the tragic, real-life story about murdered trans man Brandon Teena in Nebraska.
The poems in this book appear in various shapes and forms, from couplets and tercets to the three, page-long “Loop” poems, which are dreamy, yummy, stream-of-consciousness prose poems inspired by Canadian poet Nicole Brossard’s work. Lines from Tegenkamp’s first “Loop” demonstrate her keen ear and eye, with special attention paid to the wind, colour, ordinary domestic scenes, the natural world, and philosophic leaps: “The rise and fall of piano notes, computer’s hum, and backroads where the wind blows clean through. Pattern of pink blossoms on my living room chair and the animal nature of letters, forming, begetting, coupling tactile experience and supple thinking.”
As a prairie poet, light, wind and winter feature greatly. As a visual artist, these poems are deliberately seeped in colour, from a father’s “green Pontiac” to “white zinnias” and “cormorants/blue ghosts on the telephone wire.” I love the space this artist allows around several lines in her poems. This affords readers time to contemplate lyrical lines like this: “What about so much light/the mind goes white?”
These poems often examine seeing and being seen. The tender first poem ends with “the ongoingness of I see you”. From “Clouds”: “Touch the tree trunks and tell the clouds:/I see you.” The writer observes “dark pines rise from the mollusk dawn” (“The Return”), and she includes a sublime description of winter and a beloved mother’s failing vision: through “her left eye,/morning seen through/snow granules.” (“Little Winters”). These are also poems about metaphorical vision, ie: “the feast of geranium petals, red swoon/across the lawn”.
Tegenkamp’s debut book is luminous, partly because she juxtaposes the everyday—Mom pours coffee, puts cream and sugar/on the counter. Wipes the wink with a towel”—with insightful assertions—“Time, she says, does not flow in even measures,” but mostly because Tegenkamp’s just a damn fine writer. Several of the poems salute her mother (d. 2018), but these chiseled poems should resonate with anyone.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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