LOCAL POETRY AND PROSE EFFORTS BEAR FRUIT
Regina poet Anne Campbell’s latest collection features poems selected from five previous books reaching back to 1983, as well as a healthy ration of new work. Besides a refresher on Campbell’s work, this collection affords a look into the development of the poet’s thought and poetic strategy.
In terms of poetics, Campbell prefers mostly the short — almost enigmatic — lyric, with lots of space engineered between words, though the spaces are more a visual cue than a breath cue. You can read straight through the spaces and still receive the meaning of the poem.
The early poems focus on memory, particularly those of childhood and of various prairie locales. By her third collection a major thematic concern that carries on through the rest of her work becomes desire, a longing for a companion — romantic, sexual, emotional, spiritual — to fill the lonely rooms, hours, and arms. See, for instance, Dark Mystery and A Friend I Can Touch. By the time of her second-last collection, Soul to Touch, Campbell leans heavily on seeing herself as a writer, as someone whose occupation is taking the time to record what it is she does, thinks, and understands.
This meta-poetry, the poet watching the poet write, is a postmodern impulse that can become a little tiresome — like rock stars singing about being rock stars. Campbell is at her best, and there are many such moments, when she simply gives “this pleasure ... its own small praise,” as she does in
the charming Bacon Lover Prayer. Other such gems include Time Away and How I Almost Married Leonard Cohen, from the new poems, and Shopping, Get it Right, and the short and amazing Giving Up the House. That poem, with its eschatological shadow, prefigures much of Campbell’s new poems where she tries, “one way or another,” to locate herself in time and space, sensing her end coming all too soon.
Two other people who understand the precious nature of life are New Mexico poet Jim Harris and his Saskatoon pal and longtime poet Glen Sorestad. In Water and Rock these men return to a loving channel of their desire, Jan Lake and its environs. Sorestad has been here in verse before, with his Jan Lake Poems (1984), but unlike that visit, in his half of Water and Rock, Sorestad keeps his poems on the minimalist edge, some poems no longer than six or seven lines.
He offers nothing but unqualified praise for the chance to fish, his close friends, and the wild creatures that surround them on their excursions. In Awareness he speaks of his contentment and in Around the Table looks closely at his friends at hand, being sure to “Hold them close” because “nothing lasts.”
Sorestad’s friend Jim Harris employs a much more rigid structure, going with 16-line poems of four quatrains in all but one in his group. Where Sorestad lets his obvious love of nature do his philosophizing for him, Harris spells things out, addressing himself directly to time and its passing, the white men’s fishing camp in time
and space — particularly that of First Nations’ peoples — the balance of fishing fun and the seriousness of possibly dying by drowning or hypothermia, and the changes wrought by the cellphone and the internet on the men’s so-called wilderness excursion.
Occasionally, Harris’s syntax goes verb-less too long, or his quatrains are more for show than meaning, but all in all both men’s work conveys their devotion to a piece of country that has nourished their souls and how tender in their later years they are with one another.
Byrna Barclay has assembled a collection of stories from fellow Regina writers about the human need to move, to travel, to get away in some sense or another. In Wanderlust, we move from Brenda Niskala’s look at the original Viking cruise, with red-haired brutes from Scandinavia killing people and taking slaves, to the way some people feel about travelling, in another from Niskala, where the main character asks, “How the hell had she let Helen talk her into this?”
In Kelly-Anne Riess’s Bus Ride a mother tells her daughter, “You’ve been to one place you’ve been to them all,” but that doesn’t stop the young woman from leaving home at last and taking some chances. That’s exactly what Barclay’s main character does in Jigger, in which a young woman is seduced in every way by a union organizer on his way to the Regina General Strike. And in Redwing, a daughter takes her mother on a pilgrimage to the old hometown, so much of it falling to pieces. The very impulse that set the Vikings loose on the high seas is sadly reversed in Shelley Banks’s story.
And in Annette Bower’s powerful Beating the Devil an elderly woman manages a trip by herself into her own psyche and cleverly eludes the financial grasp of an evangelical predator. So, too, does James Trettwer send his main characters, both alcoholic men, on journeys inward, one worried about being sent “to rehab again.” And in Linda Biasotto’s lovely little Flying, a young girl takes a trip across class lines.
The collection is somewhat uneven, both in distribution of space to the contributors and in some editing decisions around syntax and sentence length, but these seven writers manage to get to a lot of places, in time, space, and those most mysterious parts of the mind.