Three New Reviews: Green, written and ilustrated by Zachari Logan; No Straight Lines by Ruth Chorney; and A Home for Hairy by Maureen Ulrich, illustrated by Brenda Blackburn

“Green”

Written and illustrated by Zachari Logan

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781998-926251

   

 

In reading visual artist and poet Zachari Logan’s art/poetry hybrid collection, Green, I was struck by the recurring motif of seeing, and Logan’s recurrent inclusion of the natural world’s diverse creatures and plants. Awe and wonder are integral elements in this innovative work, a fact that Logan asserts in his illuminating introduction, which concludes: “[this work] is, ultimately, an exploration of my own enchantment with the world …”. The title also reflects Logan’s artwork in this collection: the fifty-one pages of drawings—mostly of leaves, branches and blossoms, and all done “in green ink, pen and pencil”—were completed in a sketchbook he purchased in Venice.   

Logan’s a well-known Regina, SK artist with a global curriculum vitae. Indeed, prairie gophers, “old wasps and potato bugs” are comfortably juxtaposed against the “turtles of Morningside Park” viewed at New York’s “East 96^th Street” and “Vitosha Boulevard’s/bulging trees in Sofia”. Logan was invited to exhibit his work in Bulgaria, and references Bulgarian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev (the “̒Bulgarian Bruegel’”) as well as Caravaggio, El Greco and Canada’s Tom Thomson in this superb collection.

While employing a range of poetic styles, most of these reflective poems are written in free verse and many are narrative, including “The People I Meet on the Street,” which contains the terrific line “To walk on the sidewalk/is to draw time with your feet”.

Time is another of the poet-artist’s preoccupations (“Night dreams of a way/to the day”), but seeing eclipses all else. We meet “A Blind Raccoon in Central Park” with “Milky eyes,” and Logan reports phones “that reflect back a silver-coin gaze”. There are “concerted eyes,” “vehicle eyes,” “miniscule design human eyes,” “Carousel eyes,” “once open eyes,” and “glass-rounded eyes,” as well as many uses of “gaze,” plus “red glow side-stares” and the sun’s “afterimage/in bright fuchsia that dims to lush green”. The fixation with seeing is perhaps expected of an artist, but Logan delves deeply beyond surfaces and employs unique descriptions in remarkable ways, ie: hares’ “winter coats of built-in/anticipation” and, my favourite—a cat scratch in the prose poem “The Old Cat” is described thus: “A tiny/red stain on blue jean; an intentional, unintentional valentine.” Another zinger, from “Burgundy 1-17”:

 

             One full moon and I’m still

             at your death bed gazing at a burgundy rose

             in a bouquet.         

 

Contemporary concerns like the current US administration and climate change are also intimated. Any reader will know whom Logan’s referring to here:

 

             All of his

             horses and all

             of his men

 

             could not bring

             the price of eggs

             down again.  

 

This is a wide-ranging and nuanced collection. The poems spring off the page with hares and hornets, millipedes and blackbirds, crickets and ravens, and the artist’s myriad experiences, ie: “painting the exhumed root systems of nearby weeds;/all clumped and fleshy like tiny human organs”.

Different from looking, Logan explains that “Seeing .. is being able to visualize the experience of looking and transcrib[ing] it into a given material; to have it in turn gaze back”. Yes. Mission accomplished.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“No Straight Lines”

Written by Ruth Chorney

Published by 7SpringsBooks

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 978-1-7383235-3-1

 

Chalk it up to interesting and relatable characters, dynamic plots, and rural settings so viscerally described, you can taste the prairie soil on your teeth: Kelvington, SK writer Ruth Chorney’s latest book, the contemporary mystery No Straight Lines, is another winner. From the police interrogation of protagonist Ingrid that opens the story—a clever device for providing readers with relevant background information—to the satisfying epilogue, I was quickly entranced by this novel—the author’s fourth—set in fictional Kettlebank in northeastern Saskatchewan.   

Ben Franklin’s credited for saying “nothing is certain except death and taxes,” and while there’s no mention of taxes in this beguiling mystery, death veritably abounds. First Person narrator, Ingrid, is on “extended compassionate leave” from her kitchen designer career in Toronto. Born and raised in rural Saskatchewan, the twenty-something returns to Kettlebank after her father, a farmer, is found dead in his hayfield “on the shady side of the baler”.

Ingrid, “a home-town star who made good,” fled Saskatchewan two days after her beloved brother Eric’s funeral: he was killed in a questionable car accident six years earlier, and she’s not been back since. In Toronto, her Armenian fiancé, Gregor, died in a rock-climbing tragedy. Ingrid’s wise grandfather is gone, and even the dog, “Old Patches,” has moved on to greener pastures.

Presently, while Ingrid’s returned home to bury her father and help her mother transition to widowhood, the town’s rich and narcissistic womanizer, Tristan Everleigh, has tragically fallen off the abandoned trestle bridge that borders Ingrid’s family’s property—and Ingrid and her old best friend, Mariah, witnessed the event. Accident, suicide, murder?

As with any great mystery, Chorney dispenses numerous characters who’d like to see Tristan dead, and she keeps readers guessing until the end. While the small town’s citizens gossip and churn over possibilities, Ingrid does the things she loves: shoot at a “cardboard target” fixed to “a big straw bale” at the family’s “̒rifle range;’” enjoy tea and conversation with her caring and capable mother; visit with Mariah and her son—whom everyone in town knows is “Casanova” Tristan’s, too; and run. She runs “across the grazed-down pasture, around the slough” and “There are signs of summer’s end: gold and bronze sarsaparilla leaves in the underbrush; plump red rose hips with their waxy shine; and a few poplar leaves falling onto the path.”      

Ingrid tries to “assign logic to grief,” and for me, dramatic plot aside, this novel’s very much about how everyone manages grief differently. Ingrid and her mother find “digging potatoes” and cleaning the basement healing activities, and her mother considers going back to work. The latter says: “I know that grieving is a process and I need to give myself time.” After her fiancé’s death, Ingrid lost herself in her design work.

Unlike the trestle bridge that adorns the cover, there were “no straight lines” on the prairie landscape back in the day, as Ingrid’s grandfather frequently professed. Similarly, grieving, like this captivating novel, is full of twists and turns.    

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“A Home for Hairy”

Written by Maureen Ulrich

Illustrated by Brenda Blackburn

Published by Flatlands Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99 ISBN 978-1-0691135-1-1

 

What I know about Saskatchewan’s Maureen Ulrich is that she understands how to engage readers, her genres and subject matter are varied, and her children’s picture books—ie: Sam and the Big Bridge, which I previously reviewed—are delightfully heartwarming.

Ulrich, a former teacher, recently released another moving story for young readers. A Home for Hairy is a softcover featuring a foul-breathed cat (Hairy) with low self-esteem, and Alison, a busy healthcare worker and weekend-warrior (aka adventurer) who takes a chance on fostering the scruffy-looking feline at the animal shelter, and welcomes him into her life.

Though Hairy’s weekdays are spent inside young Alison’s brick apartment building while she’s at work or reading medical texts and crashing, exhausted on her couch (the illustration for this page shows her asleep on her couch with phone in hand, kitty litter escaping the cat box, and household chores undone), he enjoys “watching the world go by” from his windowsill perch, and during the weekends he and Alison get up to outdoor adventures like hiking, canoeing, and, when winter blows in, snow-boarding. These are daring and questionable activities for domestic cats, and regarding snowboarding, “It turned out Hairy didn’t like this adventure at all. Icicles froze to his whiskers as Alison whooshed down the hill.”

The book’s illustrated by Brenda Blackburn, an Estevan-area artist, who, like Ulrich, is a retired teacher and cat lover. Her full-colour, full-bleed illustrations “were created with Berol Prismacolor pencil crayons on Dura-lar polyester film,” and she ably demonstrates Hairy’s various emotions—sadness, surprise, worry, contentment, fear, joy and love—through his expressive green eyes and different-on-every-page postures. (The image of wide-eyed Hairy in Alison’s blue backpack as she cycles him home from the animal shelter gave me a chuckle: it’s not unlike my own dog’s expression when we took him tobogganing.)

Though orange Hairy may not agree with all of orange-haired Alison’s adventures, the fostered cat quickly becomes comfortable in her “sunny window,” and perpetually fears the return to the shelter. “He hoped he would never have to leave her,” Ulrich writes, next to illustrations that show a dripping and life-vested Hairy in a canoe, and Hairy walking across snow in cat-sized snowshoes.  

Often there’s a blatant “moral to the story” with children’s books, and I appreciate that this author doesn’t make the moral obvious. We sense that outside of work, Alison is mostly alone, and she confides in Hairy that “Before [he] came into [her] life, she was lonely and exhausted.” She says the rescue was mutual, and alludes to doing “̒more stuff with [Hairy] next summer.’” The takeaways—I won’t call them morals—are multiple: never give up, take a chance, life’s better with someone—or some cat—to share it with.

And what forthcoming adventure does fearless Alison have planned? Blackburn’s final illustration is a metaphorical exclamation mark, and a fitting end to this lovely story, dedicated, in part, to healthcare workers and rescue cats. Like all the best kids’ books, adults will enjoy it, too.    

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

Book review: The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde, written by Caroline Pgnat, Illustrations by Alan Cranny

 “The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde”

Written by Caroline Pignat, Illustrations by Alan Cranny

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$16.95  ISBN 9781771872874

  

It’s daunting to receive a 406-page novel for review. If poorly-written, it’s a tremendous slog to read. On the flip side, if the story’s seeped in richly-described settings, features distinct and memorable characters, and showcases deft plotting (including a major twist), the pages quickly slip by. Fortunately, The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde—a historical novel for young adults by Governor-General Award-winning writer Caroline Pignat—fell firmly into the latter camp.   

 My first surprise was that the title character is a girl. Fifteen-year-old Finn lives rough on the streets of 1913 Dublin. She “was in the business of surviving,” which included pickpocketing, and “lying was Finn’s mother tongue.” The scrawny lass has no memory of family, is targeted by another young urchin, Dooley, and—when she can escape the Woodhall Workhouse orphanage where she’s kept in a medicated fog—she sleeps beneath “a rusted sheet of metal,” cold, hungry, and among rats.

This lively book’s two other important characters are Eddie, a lonely apprentice archaeologist (under his archaeologist father) at the National Museum, and the 9^th century monk, Tomás, who penned a mysterious illustrated manuscript, recently unearthed in a bog. The tattered “Bog Book” is “a mulchy brown mess,” and Eddie’s painstakingly trying to piece it back together while his widowed father struggles to decipher it.

Pignat expertly weaves the monk’s dramatic story between chapters concerning Finn and Eddie. She shares the youths’ growing emotional bond and mutual mission to find “the legendary Cauldron” (that’s long obsessed Eddie’s father), Irish lore, adventure, Viking invasions, archaeology, and more than a wee bit of magic. The Ottawa writer drops a major plot twist almost 350 pages into the story, which makes the tale even more compelling.

The Irish are storytellers, and Pignat, who was born in Ireland and raised mostly in Canada, frequently honours the art and importance of story with lines like “My chapter may come to an end, but the tale always continues in the telling” and “̒There is no greater truth than tales if you but dig a little beneath the surface’”.  She even includes an Irish legend, “The Children of Lir,” within the novel. And the Irish lilt is frequently present, ie: “Affection has many faces, so it does.”

Pignat paints early Dublin viscerally and credibly, and in an interview (\included at the back of the book she explains that “Often [her] settings are as important to the story as the characters.” Here is Pignat’s Dublin:

 

     The city smelled like a soup of many simmering things—engines and

     horseshit, blacksmiths’ soot and bakers’ buns, butchers’ blood-covered

     sawdust, that ever-changing stink of a crowd, all cigarette smoke, pomade,

     perfume, and workingmen’s sweat, the unmistakable hint of malt and barley

     from what brewed at the Guinness factory, and of course, under it all, that

     briny scent of the sea.    

 

This fast-paced, well-researched book transported me, and I thoroughly enjoyed all things Irish while I was away, and Finn’s important discovery that “though the way be winding, it gets you there. Eventually.” 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Three new reviews: "Fireboy" by Edward Willett; “We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition” by Sarah Hernandez; and “Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary” by Vincent Collette, Tom Shawl and Wilma Kennedy

"Fireboy"

By Edward Willett

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-42-3

 

There are several things I can count on each time I open a book for young readers by Regina author Edward Willett: the story will be technically well-written; the characters credible and clever; and whatever weird, fantastical situations the young cast finds themselves in, there’s bound to be laughs along the way. In short, I know I’ll be impressed.

Fireboy is the Aurora Award-winning author and publisher’s latest title, and with this blaze-paced novel it’s clear that Willett’s lost none of his … fire. The story’s told by thirteen-year-old Samantha “Sam” MacReady, who missed out on her Grade 7 overnight field trip (“a camping-trip-and-astronomy-adventure”) in May and thus was spared when her fellow “Limberpine,” Alberta classmates were involved in a tragic school bus accident. The bus was driven by Grade 7 science teacher Dr. Ballard, and he and a single student—loner Meg, from the wrong side of the tracks—were the sole survivors. The remaining nineteen students mysteriously vanished, and no one can say for sure what even caused the bus to flip on its side.     

After the news crews left the small town folks alone and “The rest of the world moved on,” motherless Sam “dealt with [the tragedy] by moping and throwing things and binge-watching anime.” She especially mourns the loss of her best friend, Lorenzo. Sam’s dad takes her camping to try to cheer her, but the poor weather does little to improve her mood. She says, “̒He thought we would bond through shared misery. I don’t know if we bonded, but we definitely mildewed.’”

Later that night Sam’s woken by a voice calling her name. She leaves her tent to find that the previously extinguished campfire is now wildly ablaze, her name’s being called from within it, and she sees Lorenzo’s face in the fire, but “It looked like a mask made of glass and filled with flames.” Then he screamed.

The following night, Lorenzo appears to Sam again, aflame “in the trees behind [Sam’s] barn.” The boy’s become a walking, talking campfire, and he tells Sam that he doesn’t know what happened the day of the accident, but he woke up “locked in a room.” He doesn’t know where his actual body is, but he knows the other kids are detained, as well. There’s a powerful masked man and his wife, in lab coats, and a vague awareness of being controlled by the man via a strange pressure, but Lorenzo’s quickly learned how to return to his human body from his “flamesicle” state, if only briefly.

Sam has her work cut out for her. How will she rescue Lorenzo and their classmates? Does Dr. Ballard or the vice principal have anything to do with the crash and abduction? And what in the world do the four classical elements (Earth, Wind, Fire and Water) and Paracelsus, “’the prince of alchemists,’” have to do with all of this?

Sam’s life’s become “a straight-to-video horror movie,” and it’s a treat to read Fireboy and find out why.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition”

By Sarah Hernandez

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$39.95  ISBN 9-780889-779181

   

In We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, American academic Sarah Hernandez (Sicangu Lakota) examines the colonial dismantling of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota intellectual traditions, including “star knowledge through oral storytelling.” She writes that when missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century, the “linguistic [colonization]” began.

Hernandez teaches Native American literature and is the director for the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico. She states that “missionary translations of the Dakota language set a dangerous precedent that denigrated Oceti Sakowin star knowledge and supplanted [their] tribal land narratives with new settler-colonial land narratives that ensured that many of our people converted to Christianity and assimilated to the American nation.” Missionaries learned the Dakota language and printed bilingual Dakota-English newspapers which contained “misinterpretation[s] of Dakota origin narratives” and essentially “delegitimize[d] the Oceti Sakowin’s intellectual traditions”—and Christians replaced them with their own. These settler-colonials subsequently “stripped the Dakota nation of 35 million acres of land” and forced them onto a “ten-mile-wide reservation” in Minnesota.

Hernandez frequently makes a connection between land and ideology. Countless injustices followed the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, including the confinement of “Dakota women, children, and elders” into a “concentration camp” known then as the Crow Creek Agency, where 300 people died within a year. Survivors were subjected to hard labour and sexual assault. The women—revered as the tribes’ “culture keepers and culture bearers”—still kept their traditional stories alive, despite hardships that ranged from imprisonment to exile to boarding schools.

Traditional stories were passed down through the generations, resulting in almost 200 books authored by Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who used “English-language literacy and the printing press to perpetuate the knowledge handed down by oral storytellers and historians.”

In the book’s second section, Hernandez demonstrates how these oral traditions have been preserved via “re-imagining” by print storytellers, including Charles Alexander Eastman (b. 1858), whose eleven novels feature his grandmother; Ella Cara Deloria (author of Waterlily, a novel concerning Lakota women “bound together by kinship, storytelling, and tradition”); and writers involved in the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, a longstanding “tribal group … dedicated to protecting and defending the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literary traditions” via publications, presentations and a podcast series, #NativeReads.

Hernandez is a longtime member of the Oceti Sakowin-led Oak Lake Writers’ Society, and she contends that this combination of “old and new land narratives, old and new literary genres” is an “extension of the Oceti Sakowin oral tradition,” and that the books produced will “guide and empower future generations by reminding [them] of ]their] connection to the stars, the land, and each other.”

This scholarly text is an homage to the women who were the early story and culture keepers, and it’s a celebration of those Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who continue the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition—and healing—today. The book cover’s significant “ledger art” (art superimposed over a financial or legal document) was created by Ruben Hernandez, the writer’s brother.           

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary”

By Vincent Collette, Tom Shawl and Wilma Kennedy

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-781779-400185

   

Language and cultural identity are intrinsically connected, and for the Nakoda people, who believe that “language is a gift of the Creator,” the Nakoda language is, “through prayers and songs, the means by which important cultural values and spiritual knowledge are transmitted from generations to generations.” This is the first tenet I learned in the tri-authored book, Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary, published by University of Regina Press.

In Canada, Nakoda (aka Stoney or Assiniboine) is spoken by an estimated 50-150 people … and they’re aging. Understanding the import of language to one’s culture, Vincent Collette—professor of linguistics at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi—teamed with Montana’s Tom Shawl (former Nakoda culture and language instructor at the Aannii Nakoda College) and activist Wilma Kennedy (d. 2020), who lived on the Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation in Saskatchewan and had previously worked with Collette on two other Nakoda books (including a concise dictionary), to create a “thematic” dictionary for Nakoda-learners.

The thematic dictionary makes learning Nakoda easier as Nakoda’s a “polysynthetic language where words are often built up with many elements that attach to the root,” and thus seeing the words in thematic groupings builds the student’s “morphological awareness.” Once the root of each word is learned, and the “morphemes” (a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that contains meaning, and there are five types. "Dog" is an example of a free morpheme … the word "incoming" has three morphemes "-in," "come," and "-ing" – study.com) understood, learning Nakoda’s made easier.

In short, this is no A to Z dictionary: it's “divided into sections meant to enhance daily and ceremonial communication (including dances, ceremonies, and ceremonial clothing),” and yes, one could perhaps find an app and locate the Nakoda word for “dress,” for example, but this dictionary is a teaching tool that will help learners form sentences “in order to communicate in a meaningful way with other Nakoda speakers.”

Nakoda consists of eight vowels and seven word classes, including nouns, verbs, and interjections, like Ahé (an “expression of humility used at the beginning of prayers or songs”). Unlike English, verbs are “almost always at the end of the sentence,” making Lakoda a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. The writers give this example: English: That dog is running. Nakoda: Dog that runs.

The book’s many chapters, or themes, include the “Human Body,” “Feelings, Instincts, Emotions, and Motives,” and “Agriculture, Gardening, and Ranching.” With this dictionary you can learn how to say both practical, everyday things like, “It is a very nice day today, thus we will go fishing” and “My grandmother is in the garden,” and you can also learn how to say specific things, like “My lips are chapped because of the wind,” and “She had two miscarriages.”

As “full immersion with native speakers is not possible” currently, Practising Nakoda is the next best thing for anyone wishing to learn/preserve the language. It’s a ground-breaking reference book “for the documentation, revitalization, and strengthening of Nakoda language and culture.”

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THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

 

Two New Reviews: Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, edited by Edward Willett; illustrations by Wendi Nordell and I, Brax: A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure) by Arthur Slade

“Shapers of Worlds Volume IV”

Edited by Edward Willett Illustrations by Wendi Nordell

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.99  ISBN 978-1-98-989398-88-3

You might want to read Shapers of Worlds Volume IV on a sunny beach, or at least in a pleasant space with other people around, because I can 99% guarantee that something’s going to scare the heehaw out of you in this 402-page anthology of sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories, ably edited by Regina, SK’s Edward Willett. Willett’s an award-winning and much-published writer and podcaster who has selected nineteen writers he’s featured on his podcast, The World-shapers, for his fourth Shapers of Worlds anthology. The stories “have nothing in common except they’re all fantastical and they’re all written by authors I’ve interviewed,” he explains. Artist Wendi Nordell’s provided one black and white illustration for each story: I found this particularly helpful in the story in which a many-tentacled “Tangle” is sprouting “small smiling heads” and “flashing needle-like teeth.”

There’s a rich variety of themes, styles, plots, characters and worlds packed into this chunky nerve-rattler of a book. That’s what happens when your contributors hail from across North America and they’re writing about places as diverse as Halifax, California, and “the Sagittarius Arc.” The individual stories are  impressive, most especially—and I’m showing my bias here—the horror stories, but “Garbage,” Joshua Palmatier’s cautionary, futuristic tale about failing to recycle (it’s also about a doomed relationship) will also stay with me.

This anthology covers the horror realm well, rather like the old TV Series, “Ghost Story/Circle of Fear” did. You have your unhappy ghosts, possessed objects, scarecrow people, and various versions of hell. For Elliot Lawson—the protagonist in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s “Matter of Life and Death,”—hell is a nasty, best-selling writer who, posthumously, doesn’t like her book cover, title, or font, and continually sends callous emails to Elliot from the beyond. I didn’t see the terrifying plot twist coming in this simultaneously light-hearted and hellish tale. I  loved it.

“Advent,” by James Kennedy, is in my Top Five. A gripping, multi-layered story, it features some of the scariest horror tropes—a terrifying basement; a communicative furnace (that says “̒I will eat your time’”); a corn husk doll made by the child narrator’s now-deceased father when he was a child. The doll was “decorated with seeds and bits of wood and leaves and pine cones” and the boy’s father “made eyes and a mouth out of seeds and hair from pine needles.” This story works brilliantly in large part because Kennedy’s created such a credible voice, and because beneath all the supernaturalism, this is actually a story about grief. (Another strong story, “Yiwu,” by Lavie Tidhar, is about loneliness.)

There’s a tale about a lawyer who does bad TV commercials; the terror-inspiring “Monster Under the Bed;” a smart story, told via e-mails, about an apartment manager going insane (or is he?); a sweet brotherly bond in “Souvenirs;” and a vase that won’t break in the beautifully-written “Nineteenth-Century Vase.” Also: a graphic story about MAGA-types discussing how to lynch intellectuals, immigrants, etc. In these times, perhaps that’s the scariest of them all.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“I, Brax: A Battle Divine” (A Dragon Assassin Adventure)

By Arthur Slade

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-26-3

 

I’m unaware of any writers as simultaneously prolific and talented (ie: winning the Governor General’s Award and receiving the $10,000 Cheryl & Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence) as Saskatoon’s Arthur Slade. With more than thirty YA, middle-grade and graphic novels to his credit, Slade is a literary powerhouse. I’ve just completed reading I, Brax; A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure), a thrilling fantasy for young readers who enjoy well-read, wise-cracking, goat-eating dragons (the eponymous Brax, a “Scythian” dragon, is also the narrator of this “diary”); eye-swapping; formally-trained, teenaged-girl assassins; and battles in which the dead are sometimes still alive, will enjoy sinking their teeth into this thick fantasy.

This novel is classic Slade: simultaneously gruesome, literary and comical. Brax bears a sarcastic inner voice, and it’s his internal quips and his dialogue with Carmen—the seventeen-year-old assassin who’d plucked out Brax’s dragon eye and plopped it into her own vacant socket, after which a mortal eye grew in Brax’s socket—that make this book another winner. (The eye swap gave them special talents, including the ability to communicate telepathically with one another.)

Where thar be dragons—even dragons who are dynamite at “̒chess and marbles. And checkers’”—thar be battles, and the duo first confront farmer-attacking “ammits,” which “had the head of a crocodile, the front legs of a leopard, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus … Very, very, very ugly.” And they spit: “The acidic projectile, a brownish, lumpy substance about the size of a mortal head,” hits both Carmen and Brax. The spittle stinks enough to “curl [Brax’s] nostrils inside out” … and it causes hallucinations. What’s not a hallucination is the after-battle pile of ash that issues a warning to Brax, threatening to “̒lacerate [him] from liver to limb.’”

There’s a moat-full of magic in this book, and poof, the female-voiced ash pile forms “into an ancient symbol: the sun surrounded by a snake,” and then it transforms into a leather-vested, hairy-legged, twelve-foot tall being with “leopard-spotted” arms and “a reptilian snout populated by long, sharp teeth.” You know this isn’t going to go well. Meanwhile, Emperor Lipit has been assassinated and his thirteen-year-old nephew, Nagar, is the heir. Nagar, we learn, shares Brax’s taste in literature, and the boy “hires” Brax and Carmen to bring his uncle’s murderer to justice.   

Which, magically, brings us to libraries. Libraries are important in this tale. So are family and friendships. Carmen’s twin brother, Corwin, has his own special eye: a wizard’s. Alas, he’s in “̒a smorgasboard of slices.’” Brax and Carmen are summoned by a “spellbird” to his death scene in “Azadiq”—Brax airlifts Carmen (she travels on his back, naturally) to “the whole dead-brother situation.”

Are the murders connected? Who is the “̒snout-faced-woman goddess thing?’” Will Brax’s character flaw—“to help the weak”—and the fact that he’s “̒a stickler for language’” be relevant in the grand scheme of things within the “̒great empire of Akkad?’” Read this otherworldy book, and have fun discovering the answers.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Two New Reviews: My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories by Doug Cameron, and Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir by Sandra Ramberran

“My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories”

By Doug Cameron

Published by Cameron Narratives

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781738-687749

  

I grew up in small-town Saskatchewan and thus am familiar with folks who congregate daily at “coffee row” to remember the good old days, tell amusing stories, share gossip and passionately discuss current events. I continually thought about coffee row while reading Swift Current-area writer Doug Cameron’s memoir, My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories.

This 1945-born author is obviously a storyteller at heart, but more than that, he’s done what many people talk about doing—writing a book about their life—but few accomplish. Cameron’s light and informal tone; the emphasis on his rural upbringing (near Alcomdale, Alberta); and rambling reminiscences of boyhood escapades with eight siblings, cousins, and friends reads like coffee row conversation: I could even imagine Cameron’s coffee mates nodding in recognition as they stirred another spoonful of sugar into their coffee cups.

Cameron, who had a significant career in agricultural science (he was employed at Ottawa’s Agriculture Canada Research Station, and worked globally), has culled his varied childhood experiences into an easy and pleasurable read. He says that he’s “always wanted to write about [his] boyhood days as a toddler to a teen growing up on [their] farm,” and now that he’s “getting long in the tooth,” it was time to do it. The fact that he “loved writing this book,” shines through the short chapters, which include occasional black and white illustrations and maps.

The nearly 300-page book begins with the author’s earliest childhood memories, ie: playing with toy soldiers, and slowly becoming aware that he lived on a farm, complete with dogs and “oodles of elusive cats,” chickens, cows, horses, pigs and turkeys. This was back when chamber pots were in use, teachers gave students “the strap,” and everyone bathed in a galvanized steel tub on Saturday night. For Cameron, money was earned by picking bottles and picking rocks: the kids’ father paid a penny “for a pail and ten cents for a pile.” In those days, ten cents could buy a “box of Cracker Jack popcorn (with a prize inside), one large O’Henry chocolate bar, five licorice pipes, or, best of all, 30 jaw breakers.” 

Several food memories are shared, from church picnics and fall threshing meals to pilfered apples: “—there is nothing like the taste of stolen apples,” Cameron writes. He goes into detail about the type of candy cane in his Christmas stocking (“There would always be one peppermint candy cane with the barber pole stripes of red and white. Sometimes green got in the mix.”), and describes his first vanilla milkshake so well, it made me long for one.

Cameron presents a rosy picture of his childhood within a large rural family, including a home life filled with chores; church and community activities; school days; hobbies and sports. “We didn’t go hungry,” he writes, “and there was lots of love.”

Readers, if you recall playing “Kick the Can,” skating on sloughs, and making cattail torches, you’ll probably see some of your history in these merry personal tales.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir”

Written by Sandra Ramberran

Published by Wood Dragon Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99 ISBN 9-781990-863769

 

“You have not lived until you have shared a staff room with ten other women, sharing information about male genitals …” British-born Sandra Ramberran writes in Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir. This quote exemplifies the brazen author’s honesty and matter-of-fact confessions in her tell-all, and clearly demonstrates that from the time she was nine and a fellow student “put his hands down [her] knickers,” her body’s been controlled by others. Soon an older man was also taking advantage of her and other “young, maturing school girls” by offering to “put money in their training bras.” The quick cash allowed them to “buy sweets or single cigarettes from the local shop.”

Born the eldest of six with an alcoholic father, Ramberran’s rape at age fourteen and the ability to drink “more than most women,” seemed to set the stage for several challenging decades among “the world of massage parlours, drugs, and sex.”

School was something to be endured, and as a teen, “done with childhood games,” her focus turned to “chasing boys and being chased”—and she had an eye for the bad boys. At sixteen she was sleeping with a married-with-family man. Pubbing, fighting, losing jobs … this was the writer’s experience before she met a dashing older man in “a three-piece suit and tie.” She was soon entangled with Richard, a “con man,” whom—after his divorce came through—she married and moved to Canada with. They set up house but happily ever after was not to be, and the marriage crumbled.

Harry, Ramberran’s next lover, introduced her to cocaine and quickly began “grooming [her] for prostitution.” Her career in the sex industry took place in “high-end hotels,” and she writes that in retrospect she was “desperate to be wanted, loved, and protected.” After a few months she briefly returned to England—back and forthing between Canada and England is a constant in this memoir—and upon her return began decades of employment with “Bob,” who owned a “fully licensed” massage parlour, where “full service” (there’s a euphemism!) wasn’t allowed, but sharing whirlpool tubs and shenanigans were. “Before long, I was literally throwing money in the air,” Ramberran writes. Bob rented her an apartment, took her on extravagant trips, made her the manager of his business (there were “25-30 girls working at the parlour”), and—although Bob was married with children—the pair had a son together with the help of a surrogate, who was also the parlour’s assistant manager. Surprisingly, Bob and his wife accepted this son as one of the family; he was provided with a university education, a car, and a home. “I am not proud of many things,” Ramberran writes, “but I am proud of my son.”     

 Now in her seventies, Ramberran lives in “a 55-plus building” in western Canada, “volunteer[s] in a food kitchen,” and says her life “has finally moved beyond all the drama.” After a lifetime of wildness and pain, it seems, thankfully, that she’s settled down and found peace.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Three New Reviews: “In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community” by Marie Carter; "Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel" by Elizabeth J. Haynes; and "Tales from the Silence," an anthology edited by James Bow

“In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community”

By Marie Carter, Foreword by Afua Cooper

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$36.95  ISBN 9-781779-400468

   

 

Canada’s multicultural history is diverse and complex, and at times its narratives have been erroneously rendered. Take Black Canadian history, for example. Take the Dawn Settlement, a historical abolitionist community at the end of the Underground Railway (UGRR) in the area in and around Dresden, Ontario. Intended to be a “utopia” for emancipated American slaves, the Dawn Settlement has often been portrayed as a failure and its numerous founders overshadowed by the spotlit fame of one individual, Reverend Josiah Henson. The role of the British American Institute (BAI) has also been conflated in Dawn’s 200-year historical record. Furthermore, not all of the Black asylum-seekers who arrived in Canada via the UGRR were part of “a destitute band of fugitives” … many were members of the “Black Elite:” educated Pennsylvanian activists who migrated north and contributed intellectual and financial wealth to the “vibrant multicultural community.” These idealists fought for both the eradication of slavery and for securing equality, ie: in the segregated education system.

In her book In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community, historian Marie Carter shares quite a different tale of the Dawn Settlement’s past, and presents, as Afua Cooper (Dalhousie University’s Killam Research Chair in History) suggests in her foreword, a “historiographical intervention, a new history.”

Carter’s a fitting person to shed new light on the historical oversights concerning the Dawn Settlement. The “foremost expert of this story,” as Cooper asserts, Carter grew up next to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site;” that’s “Uncle Tom” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and she’s spent decades researching Rev. Josiah Henson, the actual man Stowe’s character was modelled after. Carter’s lived among the descendants of Dawn’s earliest 19^th Century settlers and possesses “lived experience of the land and the people.” What she reveals in her thorough study—including “land record investigations”—is that the Dawn Settlement was not a failure at all; the UGRR has been hugely romanticized; and Black history should not be “[restricted] to a single slavery to freedom narrative.” There were other leaders at Dawn prior to Henson’s arrival—men and women not immortalized by an American writer—and perhaps the idea that Dawn was the terminus of the UGRR is also a “mythologization,” at the very least metaphorically, as the “continuums of [Black] resistance and contribution” continue today.  

Carter’s non white-centric history is threaded with research concerning the troubled BAI and the manual labor school it established, managed by Rev. Henson—Carter corrects the fallacy that Dawn’s settlers were wholly “reliant on the BAI for their survival;” reports of the many other missionaries and pioneers present at Dawn before Henson (1789-1883); studies the challenge of establishing the community’s geographic boundaries; and examines women’s role in securing freedom.

Though Stowe star-rocketed Henson’s fame as “the real Uncle Tom”—he was honoured in a 1983 Canada Post stamp—Carter tells a more complete story of the era. Her meticulous retelling beseeches genuine multiculturalism, “ensuring equity and inclusion for all.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel”

Written by Elizabeth J. Haynes

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-269-0

 

Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Elizabeth J. Haynes has just published a new book, and this time it’s an essay collection. Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel is the kind of book I can really sink my teeth into. As I read these engaging essays about the author’s far-flung travels, family dynamics, heartbreak, a health crisis, history, politics and her former profession (Haynes is a retired speech-language pathologist), I quickly ascertained that the “food” here is much more than literal.

Mining experiences from a lifetime of global travels, the introverted and interesting author comes by her love of travel honestly: her father worked on a fisheries project for the British Colonial Office in Nigeria in the 1950s. “He arrived on a freighter, squinting into a bloody sunrise on the Gulf of Guinea,” Haynes writes. She concludes her first essay with an observation of her father’s “big, gnarled hands holding the knife that sliced cleanly through ham and bread and cheese and the fire-red peaches.”

In my experience, one of the most exciting things about travelling is the surprises, and Haynes shares several. She and her sister spent eight months backpacking around Asia, and her “Souls of the Ancestors: Walking around Torajaland,” concerns their time among the remote, hilltop-living Torajans in Sulawesi. In a Batutumonga homestay, the sisters learned they were sharing a house with owner Mama Siska’s deceased grandmother: “Her partially embalmed body apparently lies, as it has for two years, in a room at the back of Mama Siska’s house.” Mama Siska takes in guests to “make enough money to buy a buffalo to sacrifice” at the funeral.  

I relate to Hayne’s assertion that in “coming to a new place … the senses are sharpened, and everything seems new.” She ably demonstrates this via many poetic turns of phrase in this poignant collection, ie: in North Carolina for her sister’s wedding, “The sky is drowning in stars.” In Peru at dusk: “the sky dark as a new bruise.” Her Cambodian experiences gave me goosebumps.

Cycling in Cuba with another sister—whom Cuban men continually hit upon—the Spanish-speaking Haynes learned much beyond what a regular “turista” might, ie: that “the whole country celebrates International Women’s Day.” In Bolivia she met a Cuban professor, Pedro, who “must give 75 percent of his wages to the Cuban government,” but fortunately he still earns enough to buy his ill wife’s medication.

Haynes is an adventurer after my own heart—cycling in Cuba, kayaking in the Sea of Cortez, canoeing past Floridian alligators, trekking in Peru—but she also recognizes the beauty in Canada. As a youth in Kamloops, she’d explore “the cactus-covered hills” and exult in “a field of mariposa lilies, a storm of tumbleweed, an arrowhead, burrs and cacti thorns sticking to our socks.”

Food? There are some mentions, ie: “fresh lavash” and “sharp-tasting sheep’s milk cheese” in Armenia, but the book’s titular food is indeed far more metaphorical than actual; it’s the essays themselves that are delicious.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Tales from the Silence"

Edited by James Bow

Published by Endless Sky Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$26.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-22-5

 

James Bow spawned a stellar idea for an anthology. The fantasy and science fiction aficionado and communications officer (most Canadian writers have a day job) not only created a fictional universe, “Silent Earth,” he also bravely invited ten other sci-fi, fantasy and YA writers to share this post-apocalyptic universe by contributing their own diverse stories, each set within the confines he’d created for “the isolated colonies of the inner solar system.”

The Ontario writer and editor’s included five of his own stories—including the 48-page “The Phases of Jupiter,” set in 2151—and his contributors hale from across Canada and as far away as Australia. One commonality between the stories is that the characters all “operate independently but in tandem, encountering the same tragedies, occasionally the same joys, fighting the same battles, and making the same mistakes.” Readers will identify with the soup of human emotions the displaced individuals feel, and credible dialogue—something Bow’s particularly good at creating—helps “ground” the stories and makes them relatable.

Bow’s first piece, “The Phases of Jupiter, is significantly set on August 4^th, 2151. After climate disasters and civil strife, “nukes” obliterated much of Earth, and our little blue planet “[fell] silent”. “Riots and disasters multiplied … the old countries declared their independence, and nobody from the UN stepped up to stop them.” The Manhattan Sea Wall was destroyed and New York flooded. News stations “winked out one by one.” Prophetic?

Cameron Dixon, from Toronto, also set his story in 2151. His philosophical protagonist, Jericho Cavender, is “the last man on the Moon,” and readers are privy to his thoughts as he sits in the observation deck and considers the moon’s “grey landscape, all crags and plains stretching out to the mountains on the horizon, with the Earth hanging overhead like a broken marble.” Dixon’s a gifted writer, ie: “The ships and shuttles are silver, but that’s just grey pretending to have a twinkle in its eye.” Cavender is “alone in a place [he] never expected to be alone in,” yet he doesn’t want to return to Earth, now “a world full of weathers and wars.”  

Another highlight was Kate Blair’s “The Queen Can Never Win the Game,” set on the British Isles, “sometime around 2165.” This story read like a fairytale for adults: a British girl’s drunken father “decided to [marry his ‘hot’ daughter] off to the King of North Kent”. The polygamist King took the “hot” reference literally, and, considering the torrential rains’ effect on his crops, locked the girl in the barn to dry his soggy wheat. Three times she has to perform an overnight drying, and three times she’s aided by a mysterious woman with a “patchy hairline” and “deep pockmarks”.

Torontonian Joanna Karaplis wins the award for style: she includes letters and video interviews in her Mercury-set story about friendship and strong female leaders. 

Tales from the Silence may be about what happened after Earth went silent, but the characters in these assorted stories have much to say.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

 

Four Reviews: "Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator” by Ben Brisbois; "Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau” Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson; "Dog and Moon" by Kelly Shepherd; and "Walking Upstream" by Lloyd Ratzlaff

“Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator”

Written by Ben Brisbois

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-781779-400345

    

Dole. Chiquita. Del Monte. These banana empires are household names, and as a frequent consumer of bananas, I read Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator, by Montreal academic Ben Brisbois, with great interest. Frankly, though I’ve consumed a bunch of bananas in my lifetime, I’ve never peeled back their long and troubling story. Ben Brisbois has.

Over about fifteen years, Brisbois—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health—researched, analyzed, and wrote about pesticides’ dangerous health effects on the often exploited workers at banana plantations and farms, with his PhD fieldwork centred in the self-proclaimed “banana capital of the world,” Machala, Ecuador. He ”laboriously designed a project that would try to bring about real change by valuing the lived experiences of pesticide-affected banana workers and farmers, and by being realistic about the political and economic power relations [both globally and locally] affecting coastal Ecuador.” 

There was much to unpack, and this reader got an education, beginning with the nefarious ecological and political history of banana production, including child labour. If I only retain one image from this comprehensive text, it will be of the exploitation of children. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report included interviews with “Children as young as eight, who worked long days in hazardous conditions with pervasive exposure to toxic pesticides such as chlorpyrifos and the fungicides constantly applied with backpack sprayers and fumigation planes. These children were often not allowed to exit the fields when planes passed overhead, instead hiding under banana leaves or cardboard boxes and using shirts or their hands to hold off the falling veneno (poison).” And this was daily life. 

For as long as banana farming’s occurred, it appears major issues have existed: a “toxic soup of pesticides;” subcontracted labour; environmental injustice “(a term describing the disproportionate concentration of environmental risks in racialized, poor, and other marginalized communities);” lack of unions; corrupt governments; racism; and “brutally competitive global banana markets,” which put producers of small-scale banana farms/plantations in extremely precarious economic positions. When pressure becomes too great on banana giants, “companies have nimbly moved their sourcing to cheaper and less-protected jurisdictions,” Brisbois writes. Colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberal capitalism are part of the disparaging story, including “the granting of massive land concessions to US interests by Latin American governments.”  

Another major concern is banana farming’s “enormous carbon footprint.” And research into the medical fallout from various pesticides is challenged as chemicals are frequently combined, so it’s difficult to know if cancers, birth defects, neurological impairment, depression, etc. can be attributed to certain pesticides, or are a result of political, social and economic inequities. The global pesticide industry has continually passed the buck and “steered policy and science” in favour of commerce. 

It's grim to consider that “So long as the disparities that imperialism created … are in place, markets for fruits will always be so skewed that huge injustices will persist.” This is something to think about.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau”

Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-781779-400536

    

How did I not know about Saskatchewan-based David Garneau? The Governor General award-winning Métis artist, writer and educator initiates integral conversations about Indigenous identity and experience, colonization and the academy through politically-charged art and writing, and now 17 Canadian writers have responded to his large, compelling and highly symbolic still life series, Dark Chapters, in a striking new text. Titled Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau, the collection’s contributor list reads like a who’s who of contemporary Canadian literature, including poetry from Susan Musgrave, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Fred Wah and Rita Bouvier, and essays from Trevor Herriot, Jesse Wente, Paul Seeseequasis and curator Arin Fay.

“Dark Chapters” refers to Justice Murray Sinclair’s Reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and many of the book’s contributors are of Indigenous heritage. Editor Nic Wilson shares how across Garneau’s lifelong art-making, “Each foray is soaked in [Garneau’s] incredible attention to the codes of history, meaning, emotion, sociality, and pedagogy.” The book contains numerous colour images of Garneau’s provocative still lives, which often feature juxtapositions between mostly title/word-less books and other items, ie: skulls, stones, tense or slack twine and other bindings, and Métis sashes. We find books and a bar of Sunlight soap; an upright red book “wicked” with burning, braided sweetgrass (at first glance, the image appears to be a stick of dynamite); an open-faced Bible on a Grandfather rock; a tomahawk paired uncomfortably with a teacup; fruit and flies. Fay writes that in these “salacious mashups,” the artist is creating “a new vernacular,” and his works “expand upon and challenge the vanitas and memento mori styles, introducing a modern Métis interpretation of still life painting.”   

In his poignant response, anthropologist and legal scholar David Howes says it bluntly: “David Garneau’s artistic work typically confounds the viewer” and it requires multiple “takes.” I concur, and would add that the myriad responses, too, should be read more than once. Howes examines the role of sage smoke in Ceremony and “the treaty-making process”—“No smoke, no pact”—and explores the significance of Garneau’s painting Scientific Method Applied to the Sacred. He also discusses the sentience of rocks—objects/beings that frequently appear in Garneau’s visual conundrums. 

Jesse Wente’s clear-eyed essay is among my favourite. The broadcaster, producer and activist writes about—and personally owns—Garneau’s still life “Formal and Informal Education,” in which a red book (symbolic recurring image) dangles from a spring trap. Beyond the formal vs. informal education represented in the acrylic, Wente appreciates the painting because his great-grandfather was a fur trapper who “live[d] on the land,” and the generations of family that followed received formal education. “The painting also suggests the violence that inevitably faces us when we seek the formal,” Wente writes, noting the influence of residential school on his grandparents. “This painting is us, and I think David depicted us beautifully.”

The images and writing throughout Dark Chapters are powerful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging. As Fred Wah aptly writes, “This life of the eye is anything but still.”  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Dog and Moon”                                                                                                                                      

By Kelly Shepherd                                                                                                                          

Published by University of Regina Press                                                                                                

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl                                                                                                              

$19.95  ISBN 9-781779-400383

    

Quirky contradictions, interconnectedness, and more swerves than the North Saskatchewan—Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon delivers an audacious selection of poems that’ll make you think and possibly cheer, thanks to wordplay concerning the natural world, domesticity, etymology, poetry workshops (“Describe snow to someone who has never experienced it before”) and metaphors against a backdrop of shadows, mirrors, moons, frogs, feathers, Canadian writers and “concrete-coloured snow.” In this third poetry collection, Shepherd’s used the ancient ghazal form for inspiration, but he gives his couplets a contemporary twist with reverberations, koan-like riddles, a dash of politics and lines that had me smiling. Even titles are a hoot: “The Poetics of Space Heaters,”  and “If Your Eyes Weren’t Prisms, Would You Notice?” Prediction: this book will earn awards. 

Firstly, the pairings and unusual juxtapositions. The book begins: “A man walks out of a forest. What walks out of him?” In the second poem: “Fish grow leafy fins and tails. Trees grow fish-shaped leaves./The trees, water, fire of childhood.” The poet takes two things, ie: fish and trees, then throws in a random third element, ie: “fire of childhood.”  

Ghazals often include questions, and Shepherd’s adopted this characteristic in several pieces, asking, for example, “Did we pray to the gods who would eat us/by eating them?” and the anti-capitalist “Happiness is only a purchase away,/but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?” His questions range from the simple “Do you believe in dogs?” to writerly concerns, ie: “Who ever anywhere will read these written words?” 

In reviewing Shepherd’s first book, Shift, I noted several unique word combinations re: colour descriptions, and here he impresses again, ie: “sunrise-coloured seagulls,” “Daylight the colour of beets,” and “the silence goes violet.”

Childhood reminiscences can spread a warmth across poems. In “What’s it going to Be? Marie Kondo, or Tsundoku?”, we find this beauty: 

      Can you feel it? It’s the distant glitter of sunlight

      on lakewater between trees, first glimpsed from the back seat,

       in one of your earliest memories of summer.

In following lines, he leaps into a Walt Whitman quote, and a “bookstore customer, rough-bearded/and rough-handed,” and “So much fog on the lake.” Indeed, there’s much peculiarity throughout the collection, ie: the line “I prefer the onomatopoeic style of interior design.”

   

“Limn” celebrates personification: “Hands of sand hold on to the afternoon’s heat,” “The pale brown gravel road’s long legs/follow the shore,” and “The lake last night was so close/I could hear it breathe, its fingers on the glass.”  

And then there’s the humour, ie: 

   A journey of a thousand miles

   begins with a single schlep.

and “How to distinguish British Columbians from Albertans?/Look at their choice of Self-Help books.”

I can appreciate all the verbal backflips and hopscotching. The surprises. Like the Edmonton/Treaty 6 Territory poet, I believe that “A poem is a torch with a beam of shadow/instead of light.” I see the hills’ “nettle-coloured eyes,” and hear “The fire with its breaking-twig voice.” And I feel richer for it all. 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Walking Upstream”

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95    ISBN 9781771872706

Saskatoon’s Lloyd Ratzlaff—essayist, former minister, walker in wild places—has released his first poetry collection, and wow. I know this man and have long believed that poetry lives in him; I’m grateful his mostly contemplative poems—alive with water, birds and creatures—have found a deserving home in Walking Upstream.

The first two sections map “The Old Path” and “The Irresistible Forces,” while the latter two, “To Grouse like a Mountain,” and “Afloat,” ferry readers from “Coffee at Starbucks” to a “Prairie Cemetery” and “Nirvana Big Rest Motel.” At the latter, the narrator waits out “a steady rain” and concludes “I can do nothing/for my mother in her care home bed/but think,/look Mother,/I am because of you.” Whew. For a piece with just eleven lines, this unsentimental poem packs serious emotional punch, aided by an image of the “white petunias [that] sag/under the water’s grey weight.”  

Ratzlaff possesses a gift for evoking emotion in just a few poignant lines—some might consider this poetry’s raison d’être—and his poems reflect that over a lifetime, the former counsellor’s mastered the oft-ignored art of listening. “The Realm” contains just nine lines, but in the second stanza we glean humility and the quiet nature of an individual “who likes to hide sometimes/in a copse of aspens/and listen.” This keen ear’s tuned as naturally to “Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds” and a ”mud hen in the reeds,/so near yet so hidden,/only the tinks on some tiny anvil/betray the place of [its] nesting” as it is to windchimes: “A small orchestra improvises/a jazz suite for spring.” How lovely.

Ratzlaff’s frequently addressed his Christian fundamentalist upbringing, and several poems in this smart collection demonstrate that he’s still processing “the old religion,” with its emphasis on sin, fear and “holy hullabalujah.” As a child, a “travelling evangelist” with a “flappy bible” warned that “children without Jesus in [their] hearts/will [writhe] in a lake of fire/and brimstone.” In “My Quarrel with Yahweh,” Yahweh is “a night spirit./The sun hurts his eyes.” The poet refers to a beetle “multicoloured like Joseph’s coat,” and offers a short “prayer for the river.” 

I prefer the reflective poems and the intimate concerns they sometimes reveal, but the collection never feels somber, as lighter poems—about the poet’s dogs, or adolescents’ overuse of the word “like”—braid through the book. I enjoyed the farewell poem, “Goodbye Little Apartment,” in which Ratzlaff said so long to the “last of the old fridges/that wouldn’t defrost” and the “shabby carpet,” and, more importantly, to “beloved friends” with whom he “walked to the riverbank,/got three sheets to the wind,” and “played hide-and-seek till five in the morning” before they settled “on a footbridge” and “looked into the stars.” It’s a profound example of how, if we’re fortunate, the child in each of us never leaves.    

Always, there’s great reverence for avian friends. Bluejays, chickadees, “The gulls of Wanuskewin” and the mighty magpie, of which Ratzlaff writes: “our people don’t think/highly enough/of your people.” Oh, I say, indeed. 

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PULBISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.,COM