“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 96th 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.
“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
__________
“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
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