Into the Continent

Into the Continent
by Emily McGiffin
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9780889779891

I wasn’t sure how to begin Emily McGiffin’s poetry collection, Into the Continent, with its similar but opposite-side-up covers, front and back, and a Page 1 at either end. On one cover, a bayonetted rifle on a creamy background. On the other, a “Big Old Axe” against the same. As I chose a side (the rifle) to start my reading, I hoped I’d find the answer to why the book—praised by Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—was structured thus. What is McGiffin, author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics, metaphorically saying with this either way-ness and dramatic images?

What I do know is that the University of Regina’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics book series, of which this book’s a part, concerns titles that “[probe] discussions of poetry’s cultural role”. I mined the internet and learned that the author/academic’s work “concerns the interplay of extractivism, empire, and expressive arts,” and she self-describes as “a multidisciplinary environmental humanities scholar researching arts, extraction, and environmental justice”. Currently a Research Fellow at University College London, she’s also studied and worked in British Columbia, Ghana, Scotland, and Toronto. The global sweep of her work—and her politics—became quickly evident.

The tonehere hits like a blunt instrument: clearly the poet’s spotlight is on history, and particularly the violent history wrought by Colonialism and greed. The poems build upon one another, story-like, and the poet’s exclusion of titles supports this narrative flow. The Industrial Revolution, bleak landscapes, the sea and the natural world, a slave ship, land ownership, war, sheep farming, rape, and childbirth are grappled with via ingenious language, including some terms—”quern,” “quaggas”—that had me Googling.

The rifle side thrusts readers into Scotland, “coal-hearted” and with “feet in heathered depths,” “mud banks [standing] bleak along the firth” and “glens desolate”. Soon after, while “port lights wink and simmer on the bay,” a ship is “built for human cargo,” and the narration directs the plot: “i await my carriage”. Note the small i.

Things really get moving on the “age-old/murderous sea,” with “the hull a rising/reek as cargo vomits”. McGiffin demonstrates a sharp ear for cacophony: there’s “grunting hogs” and “planks’ and rigging’s groan”. I noted a reverence for creatures, and admire the image of a “purple-turbaned snail [dragging] a hind foot”. The juxtaposition of the industrial and the natural—ie: “pig-iron dawn” and a single vulture “scything under fisted bright”—is dynamite.

The ship docks, and we find “castaways, dispatched to master/a thorned land”. The linebreaking “master” is clever indeed, and it ushers in the next series of poems. What’s to be mastered? Oh, so much—and that’s just the rifle portion.

The work’s original, musical, feminist (“the bible is the size and weight of one man’s hand”), and clearly not pro-Capitalism or Colonialism. The rifle? War, oppression and power. The axe? Settlement and divisions. Perhaps the inverted structure represents the ambiguity of beginnings and endings. History often viciously repeats itself.

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