Exorcizing pain with poetry
The world is full of violence and calamity, as the media constantly remind us. Some people have the misfortune of experiencing catastrophe personally, while others aren’t directly affected but feel their lives touched by it nonetheless. These books show that poetry can be a creative act of exorcism and of empathy.
In 1991, Barbara Langhorst’s father shot and killed her mother, then committed suicide. Langhorst, who grew up in Edmonton but now teaches at St. Peter’s College in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, approached her debut collection, Restless White Fields, as an aesthetic experiment in dealing with a devastating loss. “You need to weave something to contain it, something daring, so then it becomes art and you don’t have to think of the pain every moment,” she said in a recent interview.
Langhorst conveys the enduring nature of that pain in the poignant image of a spring snowfall (the murder/suicide occurred in May) in which “may or april flakes pause suspended above the black ground/poised for grief to green with entanglements.”
For the poet, grief is always being resurrected: by painful memories; by lines from other writers that resonate with some aspect of the tragedy; by other deaths and mishaps. Even signs of spring are haunting reminders that her mother died when the natural world was coming back to life.
It’s difficult emotional territory, and the poems themselves, fragmentary and densely allusive, are difficult to follow at times. But threaded throughout Langhorst’s reflections are lines that bluntly address the tragedy: “There are no kind words for this:/my father put a bullet in her brain and a shotgun to his chest.”
These direct references are both jolting and necessary. But what impresses most about Restless White Fields is Langhorst’s intricate skein of grief’s “entanglements,” and her struggle to make “contemplation a countermeasure to violence.” Toronto writer Barbara Carey is The Star’s poetry columnist.