“U Alive”
By Chelsea Coupal
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9781771872836
The book possesses a self-reflective, questioning tone. Each of the twelve sections begins with a stylized poem named for the months of the year. Coupal has split these calendar poems into two columns, and rather than reading straight across the horizontal lines, the poems are best read down the left column, then down the right. In “March,” Coupal contemplates breastfeeding (“The second week I get mastitis”) and philosophizes about her life: “I could have as much time ahead/as behind me, maybe less./I wonder if everything I’ve done/equals good or bad.” Her breast milk “is the colour of salmon,/dyed by [her] own blood.”
There’s plenty of blood in these poems, ie: “Tongues wet/as blood or birth;” “Lady beetles in bleeding grass;” “blood-eyed ghosts;” “don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week/and doesn’t die;” and “blood on the sheets.” A rural Saskatchewan upbringing gives one a pragmatic perspective on death, I believe. It’s a place where one might see an eagle’s “white face red with the warm blood of a rabbit.”
Seasons are a focal point, too. In spring, “[March] lands/before rain, before geese, before seeding,/before tulips break through soil, wavy-green wings.” And in August, “Some nights the air is water/that surrounds a canoe.” How lovely. One teenaged September finds the narrator at a bush party: “We aren’t dressed/for the gentle sting of clear September night. A bonfire stains/the horizon” and partiers have “crop stubble stuck in [their] socks.”
In an environmental poem about taking a
great-horned owl to a rescue, Coupal laments a prairie where “Every acre [is]
maximized” and “chemical containers lie around.” The owl “Probably ate a
mouse that ate rodenticide.”
I commend Coupal’s smart use of verbs: “birds flurry,” “snow shoots” and “rain swishes.” And who doesn’t appreciate a great moon metaphor? Coupal’s moon is a “pale thumbprint, creased and shadowed” and, in a particularly apropos comparison, it’s “a bullet hole/in the side of an old barn”.
The Saskatchewan Coupal portrays is the one I also experienced, from dancing “in cigarette smoke” to admiring the “wheat-husk whisper” of chickadees that land in retreating writers’ and artists’ upturned palms at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, and coveting the “honey scent” of sweet peas (“Moths in watercolour”).
grandparents and then our parents. And when our loved ones die,
Sensorial, sexy, and steeped in the “small astonishment/at being alive,” I’ll savour these poems—repeatedly.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times”
By Mark Fletcher
Published by YNWP
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$29.95
ISBN 978-1-77869-047-1
At 398 pages, I harboured reservations
about reviewing Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild
Times, a memoir conveyed in stories by Mark Fletcher. What if it was
dull and/or poorly written? Then I began reading, and before I’d turned the first
page, I was rapt, as Fletcher—wildland firefighter, smokejumper and adrenalin
junkie extraordinaire—not only writes exceptionally well, this natural
storyteller’s lifetime of intense experiences could make for blockbuster
movies. He was in a helicopter that “flew directly through a residual
cottonwood tree” and crashed. He’s shared rivers with grizzlies, was threatened
by armed criminals, and, most terrifyingly, experienced burnovers: “fire
penetrated the surrounding green fuels in a rush of flying embers, licking flames
and loud, thick, wind-driven smoke. Burning trees fell close with muted thuds.
The dragon was upon us.”
His “beloved profession … nearly killed [him] a number of times,” and he earned ten concussions in the 1980s. “Parachuting into forest fires and firefighting in general come with risks,” he asserts. “Everyone knows I push boundaries.” But there’s no braggadocio here: the author regularly credits his associates, from heavy equipment operators to birddog pilots.
More than half the book brims with harrowing tales from the front line (the “Wildfire” pieces). “Wildlife” and “Wild Times” sections follow, and each section provides “snapshots of [Fletcher’s] life,” which, he explains “has been about healthy relationships” with the “natural environment, with the wildlife that shares our planet” and with myriad people. What shines through: Fletcher was masterful at the career that brought him much joy, but work aside, he also comes across as an empath, an environmentalist, a feminist, and just an all-round nice guy.
A “Huck Finn-type” from the get-go, Fletcher’s career began in 1975, and in 1993 he became a certified air attack officer with the BC Forest Service, Wildland Fire. His entertaining anecdotes are filled with the language of the trade, ie: smokejumping, saw kits, ditty bags, snags, birddog flying, jumpspotting; a reverence for natural landscapes; stories about various characters and Fletcher’s three beloved “fire dogs”. Sid, a heeler, had “an international fan club” and once, after joining his owner on a “carnival ride” of an air tanker flight in the Kootenays, the author later found the dog on his hotel bed in Castlegar. Sid had laid on the channel changer and turned on the TV—he was watching The Littlest Hobo.
Aside from “literally brushing embers off” and meeting the likes of David Suzuki, John Denver, Buddhist monks (whose incense sticks and cones ignited a mammoth old growth cedar), Mexican firefighters (“Frying tortillas on hot spots with fixin’s was a tasty shared meal”), and using sign language to communicate with a Gwich’in-speaking woman who required ATV evacuation, there are wolf, wolverine, cougar, beaver, alligator and lynx stories. The most touching concerns Fletcher’s connection to a great horned owl at his southeast Saskatchewan farmstead, and the “owl medicine” she shared.
May this absolute firestorm of a book receive the readers and recognition it rightly
deserves.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Another Leaf: A Refugee Story”
By Marg Epp as told by Ma They Yare
Published by YNWP
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-77869-031-0
Ten years ago, while backpacking around Thailand, I visited a Karen village to photograph a woman with gold rings elongating her neck. I knew nothing of Karen culture and was shamelessly after the sheer spectacle. While that experience deserves to be in a “How Not to Be a Culturally Sensitive Traveler” file, it did have me especially eager to read Another Leaf: A Refugee Story, the memoir of a Myanmar-born Karen woman, Ma They Yare, as told, with the aid of translators, to her friend, Marg Epp. A small reparation, yes, but a step in the right direction.
Epp and her refugee sponsorship group at Wildwood Mennonite Church in Saskatoon were responsible, with assistance from the Mennonite Central Committee, for the immigration of single mother Ma They Yare and her five children to Saskatoon in 2016. Ma They Yare bravely fled war-ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) with her family, and they remained in Thailand’s Mae Ra Mu Luang refugee camp for fourteen years before their arrival in Canada (sans the children’s father), where everything—food, clothing, currency, weather, customs, language—was new and strange. Epp’s compassion for the immigrant experience was partially informed by her own family’s wartime escape from Europe to Canada.
The author explains that Ma They Yare “has spent much of her life searching in order that she and her family might live lives that are about more than just survival,” and a Karen proverb about a caterpillar continually and necessarily searching for “a new leaf” to eat “in order to survive and grow” is used as a metaphor. Epp writes: “Like the monarch butterfly [Ma They Yare] has crossed borders in search of safer habitats and has shown us that just living is not enough. There is more to life than mere survival.”
Unable to read or write herself, Ma They Yare stresses the importance of education for her children. Three of the five were born in the refugee camp, and Epp’s included touching letters they’ve penned to their mother in this fascinating story that puts a distinct face on the ongoing civil war in Myanmar (frequent and brutal attacks by the Burmese army on Karen villages continue today); details what life’s like in Thai refugee camps; and records the joys and struggles of integration into Canadian society.
I get a strong sense of Ma They Yare’s strength, directness and hopefulness in her conversational, first-person accounts, from village life and running from Burmese soldiers in the jungle to “things happening to women that [she doesn’t] want to talk about” in the refugee camp, and being terrified in Canada by the house-rattling wind and the smoke alarm’s initial “deafening shriek.”
It was interesting to read about bamboo houses, dugout canoes, the custom of Karin women getting tattoos “all over [their] body” as protection against snake poison, and Ma They Yare’s “traditional Buddhist Marriage”. Actually, the entire, book was a welcome education for this reader. It’s a story the anti-immigrant faction of Canadian society would be well-advised to read.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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