"For the Changing Moon"
by Anna Marie Sewell
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00
ISBN 978-1-77187-168-6
I'd been looking forward to multi-disciplinary
artist Anna Marie Sewell's second poetry collection, For the Changing Moon. She'd impressed with her debut, Fifth World Drum, and in her capacity as
Edmonton's poet laureate, I once observed her deliver an outstanding
performance poem she'd created on the spot, based on a few words provided by
the audience. It was a kind of magic few possess.
In Sewell's newly-released collection
of poems (and songs) we again find an assured and original voice, and the kind
of literary abracadabra (ie: superb use of linebreaks) only a skilled writer
can pull off. "We are in large part composed of slanting/sun" she
writes in "The Mortal Summer". Sometimes playful, sometimes
prayerful, sometimes angry, sometimes tinged with grief (particularly for lost
family members and for injustices suffered by First Peoples and the
impoverished) or inspired by legend, these eclectic pieces prove that Sewell
knows her way around language, the map, and the moon.
Each of the book's five sections
contains a kind of moon, ie: "Moon of Wolves," and among my favourite
poems is "Kinds of Moon," in which Sewell introduces us to moons not
usually (or ever?) considered, ie: "the moon of marching activists," the
"moon of skin diseases," and the "insipid little moon of
tailored grass". What fun to read.
Of the several poems honouring the
memories of loved ones, including the poet's sister, this homage to a mother
stands out: "She is tiny now, my mother/and jokes in the morning, when/her
teeth aren't in, how she whistles/like a little bird". Inspiration also
comes from disparate people and places, ie: Sewell's poem "Start Making
Sense" provides a twist on David Byrne's "Stop Making Sense,"
and the gorgeous lines "so much turns on the breath of fog/falling over a
broad green stream" - from her piece "One Moon, Many Faces" - echo
William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow".
There's much clever internal rhyme and
plays on words, ie: "Streets of Seoul, Sewell seule," and there's even
a musicality in how these poems were ordered. For example, in
"Bush-whacking," the riverside-hiking children "pipe and
flutter, unconsciously magpie" and later they "shriek and
whimper". The next poem is delectably quiet: it's based on how light falls
upon six small cups on a windowsill. Holy dynamics. I also see this
louder/quieter pairing in the neighbouring poems "She Sang" (about a
wounded, musical sister) and "Light on the Wings," which, among other
things, praises red ash berries.
The multi-lingual inclusions (ie:
Spanish and Anishinaabemowin) and named communities (ie: Edmonton, Lake
Chapala, Kyoto) revere the places and people the Alberta poet's connected to, both
spiritually and ancestrally.
This fine collection deserves close
reading. It's a haven for all those who, like the poet, wander and wonder
beneath the chameleon moon on "Turtle Island". There are no answers
re: the big why-of-it-all, but the poet/lyricist has "built a room/safe
for the moon/to come home to" and "it has to be enough". I say
it is enough. It is very enough
indeed.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of
Climate Crisis"
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-780889-775633
Not many writers get their books
blurbed by Margaret Atwood, but BC writers and scholars Robert Bringhurst and
Jan Zwicky earned that honour with their small and powerful hat-trick of
essays, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the
Age of Climate Crisis. These "Truth-filled mediations about grace in
the face of mortality" (Atwood) are well-researched, highly educational,
and eminently thought-provoking warnings about the fate of our world and
species.
Bringhurst authored the first essay,
"The Mind of the Wild". He maintains that there's much we should -
but have not - learned from "the wild," which "is in control of
itself and has room within it for humans but does not need and cannot tolerate
human domination". What's this wild he speaks of? "Everything that
grows and breeds and functions without supervision or imposed control,"
or, more succinctly, "earth living its life to the full". Bringhurst
argues that humans are essentially committing suicide with our attempts to ""tame" the already
"sane" natural world.
What makes this essay so remarkable is
the combination of exceptional writing, science (ie: the role cyanobacteria
played in changing earth's atmosphere) and statistics, and Bringhurst's ability
to bring it all home with his use of concrete examples, ie: when the sun's
diameter expands to epic proportions, a couple of billion years from now,
"Your books, your bones, your lichen-covered headstones, and your dreams
will be a plasma of broken atoms". He advocates "letting the facts
form a poem in your mind" (a quote from physicist Michael Faraday, 1858)
and getting into the wild, all on your lonesome, to "calibrate your
mind". As one who regularly practices "forest breathing," this
makes clear sense to me.
Zwicky's cerebral contribution, "A
Ship from Delos," is dedicated to virtue and the good example set by Socrates.
(Like that famous Athenian, Zwicky is a philosopher, and she believes that her
hero - who was "condemned to death for crimes against the state," -
was innocent, and has much to teach us.) On this eve of "Catastrophic
global ecological collapse," she decries that politicians and policy-makers
are not acting quickly enough. Nor are we regular humans of the first-world who
"live comfortable air-conditioned lives, surrounded by a vast array of
plastics and energy-consuming conveniences, who drive SUVS, have several
children, eat a lot of meat, and travel frequently by air". Despite the
grim ecological forecast, "industrialized humans are not destroying
everything. Being will be here. Beauty will be here". She suggests that a
cocktail of awareness, humility, courage, self-control, compassion, justice,
contemplative practice, and a sense of humour is what the world needs now.
Buying thrift-store clothing, eating locally, and walking rather than driving
are just a few of the ways we can practice self-control in the 21st century.
The final piece, a collaboration
between the authors, focuses on Harvard's Dr. Steven Pinker's overly sunny view
and his habit of "[bending] the facts" re: Homo sapiens' fate.
Bringhurst encourages us to
"[think] like an ecosystem". Yes. Only then can we "go down
singing".
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“The Musician's Compass: A 12-Step
Programme”
by Del Suelo
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-781988-783321
Regina writer and Juno Award-winning musician
(with band The Dead South) Erik Mehlsen - who writes under the pseudonym "Del
Suelo" - explains in the author's note for his second book, The Musician's Compass: A 12-Step Programme,
that he wrote this text because "the music industry is an environment that
fosters mental illness, and [he] had no idea how to talk about it". That
said, and first person voice aside, he maintains that this isn't a memoir. What
it is: 131 gritty fictional pages about a band.
For many in the arts, what begins as a
passion can become terribly hard and unsexy work. Suelo presents a grueling
day-in-the-life of a young (and at times extremely juvenile) four-piece
Canadian rock band on tour in Germany. He peels back the lid on the rock and
roll road trip, and it's a bleak, barely-holding-it-together experience, complete
with a groupie who overdoses on cocaine, band in-fighting, severe sleep
deprivation, excessive drinking and marijuana imbibing, reeking clothes, and a
narrator (Dev) who’s almost ready to pack in his bass-playing days, yet when he
steps on the stage he's "a god, creating thunder".
Suelo has a gift for physical
description and turning out some strong and original similes. The admirable writing
starts with this description of drummer Mikey's hair: "an unkempt lawn
shrub the colour of a rusting El Camino". A nickname "spread like
scabies in a hippie commune". An untuned guitar sounds like the musician's
playing "a homemade cigar-box guitar inside a tin can".
The band, "North By Choice" -
named after a "particularly dank BC sativa strain" band member Rat's
been "growing in his basement" - is in Berlin when the story begins.
I sat up when I read that one young female fan "has curves like a freshly
poured skatepark". Post-show, the protagonist connects with German fan Marleen
and the band and their entourage go clubbing. There's non-stop beer and chaos,
and after doing a line of coke with Marleen, Dev follows her "into a room
of roaring black punctuated only by the blinding flash of a strobe light."
Moments later the pair are "in the centre of a dense, moist, multi-human
organism".
The author's abilities with description
extends to his detailing of rooms, cities, and even the interior of the band's
rented van: "The aroma of rotting cheese and stale wine wafts out. There
are cracker crumbs and gummy candies all over the floor". (And the driver,
Dev, has scraped the hell out of the rental.)
The band members say things like
"Can I borrow your lightski?", but on occasion, disillusioned Dev
comes up with something quite profound, ie: "Sundays only seem cozy if you
live somewhere and know people".
If you've ever desired a microscopic
look at the ins and outs of a rock and roll band - from sound checks to merch
table to finding a band poster in which someone's "drawn a moustache and
swastika" - on a face, read this. Über
dark, screamingly loud, and scathingly real.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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