“A Map in my Blood”
by Carla Braidek
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-096-2
Saskatchewan writer Carla Braidek’s
most recent poetry demonstrates deep gratitude for the boreal forest in which
she lives and the enviable life she’s made there, but, like anyone with the
gift of imagination and the fancy of a dreamer, her emotional pendulum can’t
help but swing toward “What if?”. Even the book’s title, A Map in my Blood, hints at the restlessness that currents beneath
poems that celebrate the natural world and its creatures, family, food, the
work of the land, childhood innocence, and rural living.
The opening poem, “Where Do I Begin,”
sets the bar high. “Beginning” here can refer to the book itself or the
spinning of a life’s tale. It’s also a phrase commonly used to express
exasperation. I admire how the Big River poet begins with ordinary details-a
broken ankle, helping fix a deck-then she takes an existential leap and asks:
“how do we know where a moment begins?” This questioning ferries readers to a
deeper level. A spark fires, we’re engaged, and committed to asking ourselves
the same question about the details of our own lives. Making our own small
worlds universally resonate is the key to successful poetry.
The poems swing between serenity and anxiousness,
and at both extremes Braidek treats us to original images, ie: “anemones ghost
the lane by the bridge\rain dapples stones until appaloosa blankets\rumple on
hills beyond the pasture gate”. In “Fingers Like Wings,” she describes how work
gloves that have fallen from pockets “trail on the path like bread crumbs
marking, not the way back, but the place we fly forward from, fingers splayed
into wind”. I love “a pot of daisies rises on the veranda\one small sun
reluctant to let summer go,” and her gorgeous image honoring “a man who keeps
the sun in his pocket”. He is a gardener and preserver whose “jars\glow on
their shelves with the intensity\of a midsummer rainbow”. Easy to see this, and
feel the quiet joy it transmits.
Braidek delivers glorious sensorial
leaps, ie: “good wishes smell\faintly of oranges,” and a good deal of
musicality, ie: “my neighbour’s corn is disappearing\ear by ear into the
night”.
The restlessness is often indicated by
hunger, ie: “one day I wake up ravenous,” and is voiced in lines like “she
struggles with possibilities\flips pages in her mind,” and “a void wants to be
filled”.
We all hunger, but what’s described in
“The Rock,” a narrative told in one long paragraph, is as close to my idea of
utopia as it comes: a day on one’s own property with time to sit on the deck
and watch the children play, then move to the campfire where vegetables and
“moose strips” are roasted. The “dogs skulk at the edge of the yard, half crazy
with the smell of fresh meat,” and as evening arrives the guitars and fiddles
comes out, and the children settle onto laps by the fire. If only that were the
tune of “all our lives\being sung,” what a happier world this would be.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Wind Leaves Absence”
by Mary Maxwell
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-100-6
I read Saskatoon poet (and nurse) Mary
Maxwell’s first book, Wind Leaves Absence,
with interest and no small amount of admiration. Many first books of what’s
often called confessional poetry-I prefer the word intimate-are a compendium of high\low events experienced over the
writer’s lifetime, and what results is a wildly disparate package. While
diversity can make for a lively read, we often see more seasoned writers tackle
exclusive subjects, examining from multiple angles and probing more deeply to
illuminate, better understand, and process. Maxwell daringly takes on the
landscape of grief, specifically the pain experienced upon the deaths of her
father, two brothers (who died in car accidents two years apart), friends, and
patients. Religion–in particular the Catholicism she grew up with and appears
to wrestle with (“miserable prayers”)–is also front and centre in this
collection.
In the first few poems the writer
establishes mood with phrases that emotionally thrum, like bells in a deserted
monastery: “the wilderness between words,” “Trousers fall from hangers\collapse
on the floor,” and “Pushing his walker through wet matted leaves.” She does a
spot-on job of portraying the hopelessness of dementia, ie: her father must
navigate “the daily maze of the kitchen”.
I found two memory-loss poems
particularly moving. In “Line on Paper,” when her father tries to draw a
beloved horse, Sandy, he manages the initial line to indicate the horse’s neck,
then “He puts the pencil down, looks at me\doesn’t know\what the next line
should be”. In the five-line poem “Birthday,” he is signing a card for his wife
and pauses because he “[doesn’t] remember how to spell wonderful”. This
is powerful because it objectively shows her father’s decline. I expect that
Maxwell’s nursing background–those in the medical field cannot dwell on the
inevitable losses–has had a positive influence on her poetry: there’s no
melodrama here. This is just the way it is. But sometimes the medical frankness
is rattling, ie: in “Old Man’s Friend,” after the poet’s father chokes and is
admitted to hospital, the presiding doctor declares that pneumonia will move
in. He “closes the chart,” and says “‘We call it the old man’s friend’”.
These mostly quiet poems often reveal
life’s disquieting ironies, ie:
funeral orchids have “choked\fallen over\gone dry” while in another room
“birthday flowers\loudly proclaim spring”. After a night of summer joy-riding a
friend’s daughter remains unresponsive in hospital. When the poet walks home
from this scene, “Cars roar past, music\blaring, girls laughing”. In “Sweet Old
Lady,” the author\nurse finds a diabetic woman’s apartment filled with candy
while her feet have “gone black,” the “sweetness eating [her] alive”.
Maxwell does not obscure the raw
realties of death, nor does she makes saints of her dead. In a poem titled
“Fool,” she writes “I’m standing in line at The Bay to buy\a pair of pants for
my brother’s corpse”. She shows us that just as winter “falters into spring,”
so must we move on after unfathomable grief, and writing it all out is good
medicine.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Shift”
by Kelly Shepherd
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-104-4
I was looking for “shifts” in Kelly
Shepherd’s poetry collection, and I found them. Shepherd lives and teaches in
Edmonton, and his gritty book, Shift,
is testament to the fact that his hands have worked more than a pen. The author’s been part of the multitude
that migrated to Fort McMurray for work, and he shows us many sides of that
“orange-hardhat” dynamic, from workers “loading into buses before dawn, getting
paid to build something\we don’t understand for someone we don’t know” to the
“endless crumpled sky” and a “landscape\painting on the lunchroom wall” that is
“of another place, not here”.
Shift,
then, refers in part to shift work, or a work-shift. I also found it in poems
like “Honing,” about cement grinding\smoothing.The shift here comes when the
narrator recognizes that the “ugly, utilitarian, dusty” cement “[opens] itself
up and\the stones glimmer like stars”. There are dramatic shifts in weather
during all-day drives, that moment “when the steering wheel started to bloom”
and “the windshield blinked in the sun”. In the title poem, the shift concerns
a diving grebe and a duck’s lift off a lake: “the shift from element to element”.
The poems differ in subject-from
northern labour poems to meditations on spring, or an apple, and what a tire
might sing if it could. Shepherd zooms from grit to romance and back again,
fast as a bear. Some poems are short as haiku, others, like “Ed Rempel’s Dog,”
(which tells the story of a farmer upset with his hogs for eating the chickens,
so he threw his German shepherd into the pen “to teach those pigs a lesson,”
and you might guess the outcome) read like postcard fiction. There are several found
poems, and numerous pieces written in couplets, tercets or quatrains. The poem
titled “Fort McMurray Acrostic (found: public washroom)” can be quoted in its
entirety here:
“So
You
Newfies
Can
Receive
Unemployment
Down
East”
This is a playful hat-tip to Syncrude,
of course, but in other poems the author affects a more serious attitude toward
the oil sands and the physical dangers incumbent in hard labour. In “The
Straight Lines of Cities” he considers how “no one thinks about” the work that
goes into making “the sidewalk under our feet.” How the cobblestones were
fitted together. The “bent-axle\wheelbarrows and sweat-fogged safety glasses”
behind the work. And no one knows about the lad who contributed his index
finger, via a circular saw, to the project’s completion.
Birds, animals, and flora also
frequently star, and I applaud how Shepherd compounds (via hyphenation) plants
and animals in his work. He writes of “deer-coloured grass,” “coyote-coloured
earth,” and “fish\-shaped leaves in the wind.” This is a writer who does the
watching few have time for, then presents his observations to the world in
fresh ways, ie: “With his tail the squirrel ratchets himself up the tree.” See how
he’s taken a mechanical tool\action, and paired it with nature?
The excerpts above speak for
themselves; this is damn fine work.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
