BOLD NEW JOURNEYS IN POETRY AND PROSE
Here are three releases from Coteau Books’ fall run.
Breathing at Dusk ($17.95), by Saskatoon poet Beth Goobie, is a brave and harrowing journey from a certain hell into a kind of earned and willed redemption. Goobie’s bio page submits that she grew up in Guelph, “where the appearance of a normal childhood hid many secrets.” This is a cruel understatement.
Late in this relatively short but packed book of poems, in Mother was Not, the speaker returns to her family home after getting away from its horrors, “the daily apocalypse of our family detonated,” “the leash of obedience taut about my throat.” Here, her father turns to his 31-year-old daughter and casually remarks, “underage girls like sex from older men.” Her mother has just gone inside and she wonders “did i hear that right?” “With the same meticulously manufactured benevolence,” he turns to her again and says, “underage girls want sex from older men.” She runs in the house to confront her mother with what her father has just uttered, and her mother’s face disintegrates and she gasps. Then, in an act that helps define this collection, the mother “metamorphize”(s): “the mother who knew/ lifted herself out of the truth and went away somewhere.”
What the mother knew is that her husband and father of her children, as set down in poem after poem, is a depraved monster. As Goobie lays it out, he was a music teacher in a lovely home on a leafy street, but “the opening of a door could trigger an unexpected key change.” Then, out of these “ecstasies of arpeggios,/ the dutiful wisdom of scales,” he could “grab my brothers ... slam their heads/ against the floor,” or “thunder upstairs” where Goobie was playing with a friend and punch her in the face.
Goobie got away — a brother killed himself — and in What I learned at Bible College she notes, “unshackling the mind is lonely work.” But she does it. She learns her own “blessed words that could take/ a dogmastricken, guilt-ravaged heart/ and open it to breath, sun, joy,” and that “you are more than what was done to you.” There is such a thing as “pleasure without pain.” As I said, this is brave and harrowing book.
Regina writer Ven Begamudre offers a fascinating and sometimes maddening look at his life’s journey in Extended Families: a memoir of India ($24.95). The story is fascinating for some obvious reasons. His extended family is a wild assortment of successes and failures, and Begamudre was moved in and out of their lives as his parents got their educations, decided to emigrate, and travelled through England — the great mother ship of the colonial empire — to Canada, one of its outposts. That his parents had a rocky relationship and lived often apart only adds to the story’s minor calamities.
What Begamudre discovers as he describes, compellingly, various aunts, uncles, cousins and their lives, vocations, even a self-immolation, is that the harder he tried to become a Canadian, the more exotic he made himself to his family. One uncle “thinks I’m special because I left India fifteen years ago to become a Canadian.” And later: “I was no longer Indian
... Without really looking for the answer to a question — Am I Indian or Canadian — I had found it somehow: I was neither; I was both.”
This memoir, maddening in that Begamudre often repeats himself, or fictionalizes what he’s just told us and tells us again in his effort at self-realization, is a quest for identity, a classic mission, and one, fortunately, that is for the most part lavish in engaging detail.
Finally, in a labour of love from a widow, an editor, and a publisher, comes A Place You’ll Never Be ($21.95), by the late Rick Hillis.
Saskatchewan readers will remember Hillis as a blazing light of promise who published a fine book of poetry and an even finer collection of short fiction, Limbo River, before moving to the U.S. to take up a host of fellowships, residencies, and teaching positions. He died in 2014, leaving various manuscripts in different stages of completion. His widow, Emily Doak, approached Coteau Books with the manuscript of this novel, and they brought longtime writer/editor Dave Margoshes aboard to pull the book together.
In A Place You’ll Never Be a couple of well-meaning, but hugely ill-prepared, prison officials take a group of soon-tobe-released cons on a canoe trip north of Prince Albert as a bonding exercise.
What they end up with is one guard, a female corrections official who may or may not be the guard’s girlfriend and her sullen teenage son, a trustee who really wants to do well and get out, and five prisoners in various states of acceptance and denial about their crimes.
Soon into the woods they discover there are lethal flying creatures, something of a giant mosquito with a scorpion sting and flesh-eating capabilities. Here come the metaphors. They also discover that just about everyone has an agenda, and it isn’t male bonding. The biggest guy is a caretaker for a Northern California grow-op and he has plans, along with another guy, to make a big score.
By the time his scheme’s been uncovered, and the caterpillars preceding the flying stingers have eaten the marijuana and everything else, all and sundry have turned against each other, in various forms of violence and cruelty.
There is some bonding, some growing, and we get the backstory on the trustee who really did commit a crime and really does want to get back on the right side of the street. Hillis always did love tough-guy American fiction, and his time down south turned these bad eggs to hardboiled.