Door at the End of Everything, The

The Door at the End of Everything
by Lynda Monahan
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.99 ISBN 9781998273133

The metaphorical title of Lynda Monahan’s fifth poetry collection, The Door at the End of Everything, is lifted from her long, forthright poem of the same name. The piece is set in a mental health facility, and several of these saturnine new poems—particularly those in the book’s middle section, “Saying the Unsayable Things”—are based on the veteran SK writer, editor and workshop facilitator’s experiences as writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. I’d bet my snow boots that her facilitation of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, and, much more intimately, personal and familial experience, also inspired these thoughtful poems.

As Monahan writes, “there is poetry everywhere,” and bravo to her: she surely finds it. It’s on tattooed wrists that cover scars, the bulimic who “gorges even on [drinking water]”, and in the patient treated with ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) who says he “returned home/like the dry cleaning/my mind pressed flat/as a pair of black dress pants”. These are plainspoken, powerful poems that speak to truth, hope and resilience, even when a donated coat (“buttons long since missing”) is “the closest damn thing” a man experiences “to anything [he’d] call a home.” There’s much empathy for the unhomed and residential school survivors.

The versatile writer’s free verse also delivers images of domesticity, ie: “laundry/heaped like a small unscalable mountain,” and there’s “an anarchy of wet towers and dirty shirts,” plus family poems. Like most of us, Monahan often writes from experience, and some of her most powerful poems concern a difficult father who was “bigger than all our lives.” She notes that joys seems easier for some people—like her sister—who finds it “in the wild asters at the road’s edge/on the filigreed wings of dragonflies.” For others, the “white lace of baby’s breath in ditches” is not enough. Sadness, loneliness, alienation and invisibility … these are the stones in this collection’s river, and sadness, especially, doesn’t reveal “the way stars sparkle up the sky/or when clouds are doing something to the moon.”

I appreciate how Monahan uses fire, the colour blue, food, and even the forest to manifest mood in her carefully-crafted work. Things decay and relationships stale. In “Poor Mary,” apples and peaches rot in “soggy cardboard boxes,” and, when visiting, the poet writes of “fruit lies flitting around our heads/like miniature Tinkerbells.” What a brilliant simile. The forest is seen both as sanctuary (“here where fox glimmers/in the purple shadowed snow/I know myself best) and, as in the poem “Clear Cut,” a “place of fractured branches/and broken spirit and loneliness.”

The book’s third and final section is rainbow-like. In “These Little Things That Save Us,” we find “a nest of newborn starlings” and “bits of beach glass.” Monahan knows and eloquently writes about the way the simplest things—skin “perfumed with wood smoke”—sometimes make everything better.

This new collection brims with poems that anyone with a beating heart must feel in the pit of their stomach. Bravo, Lynda Monahan.

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