House Beneath

“House Beneath”
Written by Susan Telfer
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95 ISBN 978-1-926710-02-0

The title of Susan Telfer’s first collection of poetry, “House Beneath,” is ripe with metaphorical possibilities. It suggests that readers will be privy to a story beneath the official story, that there is – or was – more going on than meets the public eye.

The book begins, uniquely, with a photograph of the poet’s parents circa 1964. An attractive, healthy and happy-looking pair, they “smile with their teeth.” But the book’s darker undertones are expressed in the opening poem’s final lines: “He was already learning to mix rye and soda. She was\reading in Dr. Spock to let me cry.”

In my reading, I’ve noticed that first books almost constitute a sub-genre within poetry. Often poets air childhood demons in these books; or recount adolescence; first loves and early mistakes; and, quite commonly, their relationship with their parents. The latter is the focus of Telfer’s collection. With both now deceased, she peels back the layers of family, showing us that her “famous” father – “your picture still on boardroom walls,\only man in town with a tie,\first to buy a computer,\ first house with a microwave” – became the source of much anguish as he regressed into a man who “became famous\among dealers, users and drunks,\for throwing it all away, yes,\infamous father, even your daughters,\your daughters.”

Being orphaned is a subject Telfer explores in numerous poems, but as she also demonstrates, for all intents and purposes she became “Fatherless,” long before her dad actually died. Already a mother herself, she writes: “I’m weak from chasing toddlers, my hips\still wobbly from childbirth. I can’t carry you.” The poet’s mother suffered with ALS, and we learn, in a poem simply titled “ALS,” that the woman “almost calcified into\the rock [she] wished to be.”

Pieces about the stunning west-coast setting in which she lives, the births of her children, and desire also populate this smartly-dressed collection. Telfer lives in Gibsons and teaches high school in Sechelt, BC. I adore her short poem, “Crows,” which begins: “One dark rain-sopped afternoon,\our lawn is scorched black with crows—\a smoky blanket of shine and flap.\The bare oak trees, too fool-full of hundreds\of crows. I have set my plans on fire.” Highly imagistic and original, and the poet is really paying attention to sound, as well.

Another dandy is “Fecund,” which opens (brilliantly!) with “Let the butter puddle on the blue plate:\my daughter is three days old.”

Finally, a few words about desire. It’s difficult to write about without overdoing it, and often less is more. “We had forgotten how easy joy is,” Telfer writes in “Chapman Creek,” and in “Ovulation Song”: “Follow me to the end of the deep dock,\hand in hand and hot wind, full moon over\Penticton shining its wide watery\path to us, then kiss me deep, no\Presbyterian kiss, a kiss echoing\like a long-held choir note, my cheeks humming.” Ah, good stuff.

“House Beneath” is published by Hagios Press. The book’s an interesting read for anyone who harbours ghosts in their past, and don’t we one and all?

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 24 February 2010 at 12:01 pm Leave a Comment
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Gabriel’s Beach

“Gabriel’s Beach”
Written by Neal McLeod
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-5-4

“With the stories and the strength of our ancestors, we can find our home in the river again.”

These are among the introductory words of Neal McLeod, a writer, visual artist, film-maker, comedian, and professor at Trent University in Peterborough, ON, and in his poetry collection “Gabriel’s Beach,” we find some of the stories and individuals this champion of Cree and Métis culture pays homage to.

The “Gabriel” of the title is the poet’s mosôm (grandfather), a respected soldier who fought at Juno Beach, “where thunder met\the water,” and one of the many ancestors from whom the poet draws strength during his own personal battles. McLeod thanks Gabriel for “teaching us that that fire of the beach helps us to survive and keeps us from surrender,” but admits that in his own life, he has been a “son of a lost river, unable to hold the fire of Gabriel’s beach.”

The book’s first section is a mostly serious tribute to Gabriel and others, and it relays some of the war horrors Gabriel and fellow soldiers experienced: “hunger made them crazy\stomachs empty\vessels without holding\they think wîhtikow thoughts\eat their own excrement”. McLeod delivers a sharp contrast between the battleground and the life Gabriel left in Canada, as we see in this contrast: mosôm Gab welded “metal from bulldozers\patched together\like rainbow nôhkom’s quilt”.

We also meet another side of the book’s hero. In “Mosôm Gabriel’s Fight,” one of the strongest pieces, Gabriel and another man spar in Debden, SK. McLeod writes of “the other guy”: “he was like a man\running for chief\with no close relatives”.

Ah, humour. McLeod’s at his best when he’s funny, and he often is. He introduces us to “Mosôm John R. McLeod,” who “always wore his pants up high” and whose “Indian Affairs heavy glasses\would today be strangely trendy,” and to “wîhtikôhkân,” who ran from the church when his prearranged wife-to-be “took down her veil” and he discovered “she was made poorly.” In the entertaining “Thank You Mr. Brad Pitt,” the actor’s saluted for getting the narrator’s lover “hot\like a Coleman stove\at a powwow.” McLeod writes that Pitt “butter[s] her bannock\bingo card ready.”

Special attention’s paid to grandmothers and other female elders who pass on the stories that “give our bodies shape\and guide the path of sound\like trees guiding the wind.” Of “Cîhcam,” the mother of Gabriel, the poet writes “her body was our blanket\gave us life and language\brought stars from the sky”.

McLeod’s stories include the legend of chief Digging Weasel, and Buffalo Child, who was sheltered by a buffalo that later turned to stone. We learn about the importance of names, dreams, and trees.

“Gabriel’s Beach” is a political book – there are poems about “Indian mafia\like the Taliban,” and McLeod shines a spotlight on racism in “Spring Time in Kinistino,” but its seriousness is balanced by poems including “Tribute to Bob Barker,” and “Casino Culture,” where “Vegas meets neechiness.”

McLeod claims that he does not “hold the fire of Gabriel’s beach with grace”. This book proves otherwise.

Published in:  on 13 January 2010 at 2:31 pm Leave a Comment
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You

You
by Gary Hyland
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-6-1

In the introduction to his latest book, You, celebrated Moose Jaw poet Gary Hyland declares that the relationship between poet and reader “fascinates” him. In the poems that follow he explores the various modes in which that seemingly simple pronoun, “you,” is deployed, and the diverse relationships – and “variations on relationships” – which spin upon it.

If readers are at all familiar with Saskatchewan literature, they are familiar with Gary Hyland. His list of awards – literary, teaching, community-based – is long and impressive, including, recently, the Book of the Year and the Poetry Award (2008 Saskatchewan Book Awards) for Love of Mirrors: Poems New and Selected. With You, however, Hyland fans can expect a somewhat different voice than in earlier publications. It is at once more immediate, more introspective, and perplexed. In these meditations on life – its meaning and beauty, its quiescence and transience – Hyland does not offer answers, but like any truly clever human being, he does ask the right questions. You is his finest book, and his most important.

The term “postmodern” could be applied to this work. It often draws attention to its own existence, or to the reader. “Salvation,” for example, begins: “This poem’s as boring as leaves wet with rot.” (Not true, by the way). In “I Knew It Would Be You,” we read ” … this poem accepts complete responsibility,” and even titles demonstrate self-awareness, ie: “The Book That Knows It’s A Book” and “Is This About You?”. The latter poem is a two-page litany rife with Hyland-esque humour, ie: “If your right foot is in a cast\because you kicked your neighbour’s cat\in winter and lo and behold\it was already dead and frozen,\this poem is not about you.”

Two stanzas later: “If you have attempted or\thought seriously about\repairing a defective condom,\this poem is not about you.”

More interesting, though, are the wisdoms Hyland shares gained from a lifetime of watching, listening, and contemplating. In “Here,” the poet writes: “We are not Atlantic or Pacific\but both and all the stops between.” “Solarity” is an ode to the sun: “Always you have been at the centre\too brilliant to be seen” and “Even praise misses you.” From another ode, “Meadowlark”: “On your lichened boulder\you all but burst with the bliss of seeing.”

One could spend a long time within the layers of this book. Firstly, it should be enjoyed for its own sake, but it also deserves study. Consider these lines: “All day the day has spoken to me.” “Of course death is an equation,\an igloo of water in a sea of ferns”. “Everyone is wrong about everyone else,\all those secrets wasting in secret places.” “I hold you in the way\a forest holds wolves on a winter night.” “Silence always wins.” Poems like the brilliant and touching “You Are Here” and “Turning to Brick” I wish I could quote in their entirety.

You has been published by Hagios Press. It is a small book. It is a red book. It is a heart.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 21 May 2009 at 12:24 pm Leave a Comment
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Yellowgrass

Yellowgrass
Written by Allan Safarik
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-4-7

I am always keenly interested in reading the poems of writers who have selected to live in small Saskatchewan towns – as have I — rather than our largest cities, and seeing how that experience flavours their work. Acclaimed Dundurn, SK writer Allan Safarik is among my favourite poets, and thus it’s always a treat when a new Safarik title turns up and he again illuminates that which is beautiful and profound and right before us, though we ourselves fail to see.

In the past I’ve praised this 2005 winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry for an eye and ear that pay attention to the smallest of creatures and details, and in his latest book, “Yellowgrass,” published by Hagios Press, Safarik — like a tour guide for the almost invisible and overlooked — again treats readers to his astute sensory perceptions and literary prowess.

First, a few titles from “Yellowgrass”: “All About Dying in Bed,” “Nothing Defines Humanity like the Essential Rat,” “The State of the Insect Economy,” and “Portrait in Grassy Dress.” Ah, we say, skimming the Contents page, here’s a poet who understands that even the title of a work deserves great attention, and we lick our lips at what’s to come.

And what is to come includes lines that read like miniature poems: “The fragrance of night depends upon tree pods,” he writes in “Desert.” From “Moonlight Dogs”: “Far out on the Hutterite meadow\deer jump at the moonlight”.

There’s “A flock of white geese\longer than a train” in the poem “Map of the Road.” And look, in “Mule Deer on the Hanley Road,” how he transforms a barbed-wire fence into poetry, describing it thus: “Thin line of the horizon stapled\along the edge of the wind”.

There’s also much fancy in the book, including talking and dancing animals, giants, and dream fragments. Many of the poems are simply good fun. In “Rumours From Heaven,” Safarik writes: “Everybody\smokes\in heaven\with the\windows shut\to maximize\ the buzz”. Another poem, “Elephant News,” begins: “At the reading room in the Franc[e]s Morrison Library\the elephant can’t find news about his species\in the domestic or foreign press”.

Safarik is also a storyteller, and some of his best pieces – like “Visitors,” “Unknown Details,” and “Neighbour” – relay interesting anecdotes about relationships in a poet’s concise manner. Like the houseflies that often appear in Safarik’s work, we feel like the proverbial “fly on the wall” as he describes scenes of domestic distress and confusion.

It’s clear that the poet also keeps one eye on the larger world, fraught as it is with economic crises, ecological issues, and war. Safarik, then, is the best kind of seer. From the local coffee shop, where directions are imparted (“Follow the gravel\past the Mennonite church\until you reach the canal\then right to the crossroads\for eleven miles\you’ll come out\by Eugene’s barn\near the correction line\From there it’s easy”) to a hotel in Moscow, from prairie grain fields to Baghdad’s streets, Safarik writes deftly about the world we live in and share with the beasts.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 29 April 2009 at 9:46 am Leave a Comment
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Mongrel Love

Mongrel Love
By Judith Krause
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Marie Powell Mendenhall
$17.95 ISBN: 978-0-9783440-1-6

Judith Krause’s fourth collection of poetry takes the reader on a journey through local and exotic worlds.

The journey may also be a metaphor for life. The poems are divided into three sections: “A Discovery of Strangers,” “Cargo,” and “Plots.” All three can be understood in different ways. “Plots,” for example, fit a story, a cemetery, or a piece of land. The poems explore all of these meanings.

Krause experiments with poetic forms, line endings, and imagery. The words and images in Mongrel Love are chosen to take the reader along on the journey. “We are all wounded/& beautiful” says the title poem, as we travel “the fruitless/ quest for the familiar.”

In “Arrivals” the narrator goes to Paris and meets “the man who saved my father’s life by sleeping in.” In “This is How,” travelers remember “floating down the river,/ all wine and white lights…”

The poem “Thirteen Ways of Viewing a Public Park” tells of “people paddling canoes up and down Regina Avenue.” And later, “How a sudden blooming of dragonflies becomes an iridescent veil,/ a living scarf, floating through the evening air.”

“The Museum of Sounds” tells a life story through what seem like random sound effects. The poem “Remains” is dedicated to Tamra Keepness, a child who disappeared in Regina in 2004. In “The Search,” we find “every twitch in our dreams is a sighting of the lost.”

Krause is a Regina writer, editor, and teacher. She won the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2006. She has published three other books of poetry: What We Bring Home (1986), Half the Sky (1986), and Silk Routes of the Body (1981).

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 1 October 2008 at 11:29 am Leave a Comment
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Landmarks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles

Landmarks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles
Text by Terry Fenton, Art by Dorothy Knowles
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$25.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-2-3

If members of the general public were asked to name a prominent Canadian landscape painter, I’d guess that they might identify a member of the Group of Seven or Emily Carr, but here in Saskatchewan we also have a number of landscape painters of prominence, and high on the list is Dorothy Knowles.

Terry Fenton, acclaimed landscape painter and former Mendel Art Gallery director, has forged an aptly-named homage to his friend and fellow artist, Saskatoon’s Dorothy Knowles, and Hagios has packaged the text and forty stunning Knowles’ images in a book that one might expect to pay twice as much for.
“Land Marks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles” is a tour de force.

Fenton met his subject at an Emma Lake Artists Workshop in 1965, where another artist commented: “That housewife from Saskatoon is making good paintings.” Not surprisingly, the famous Emma Lake workshops (initiated in 1933 by Walter Murray and Augustus Kenderdine) played an integral role in Knowles’
life and work. It was here that she “discovered a passion for art that was to change her life”. Her connection with Emma Lake continues: since 1968, Knowles and her husband, artist William Perehudoff, have owned a cottage near
the art camp.

Aside from exploring Knowles’ personal history, Fenton also winds readers through the evolution of landscape painting here, noting that “members of the Group of Seven weren’t attracted to the Canadian prairies.” He details the importance of the Mendel family to the Saskatoon art scene; the development of
the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Saskatchewan; and the importance of the American abstract painter Barnett Newman’s Emma Lake workshop, which spawned the group of artists known as the “Regina Five” and”set the tone for the great workshops of the 1960s and ’70s”. (Knowles, who had become a mother of three, missed the Newman workshop).

It’s interesting to learn about Knowles as a person, as well as a painter. “One senses that she sees life as a kind of comedy, like Jane Austen, perhaps. She is as bemused at her own accomplishments as she is with others,” Fenton writes, and comments upon her “inquiring mind” and ability to continually challenge herself. He speaks of her practice of painting on location – using a van “as a kind of portable studio” – and how the camera became a “sketchbook for reference in the studio.”

Knowles’ main subjects are the valleys of the North and South Saskatchewan; “holiday country on the fringe of the wilderness; and mountain scenes, which differ from other artists’, in that “They convey an impression of being in the mountains without being about the mountains.”

Of the genre itself, Fenton writes “A landscape painting is a kind of stage set without players.” I like that. Like Knowles’ luminous images, offset in the book by wide white margins, it is unselfconsciously poetic. And I agree with Fenton: “Knowles is Knowles, uniquely.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 10 September 2008 at 11:31 am Leave a Comment
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