Standstill

Standstill: A Hopewell Earthworks Daybook and Other Essays
by Bruce Rice
Published by Long Road Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00 ISBN 9781068949708

I’ve long admired the breadth of Bruce Rice’s sophisticated poetry, and now, with the publication of Standstill: A Hopewell Earthworks Daybook and Other Essays, I can attest that his creative nonfiction is equally diverse—and even more satisfying. In his new five-part collection, Saskatchewan’s former Poet Laureate explores various types of language and arts’ life-saving abilities; presents a poetic and sensitive travelogue as he crosses the border to explore the 2000-year-old Hopewell Earthworks (sites aligned with the lunar standstill, long sacred to Indigenous peoples); and transports us to the ICU-bedside vigil for his deaf sister in Nova Scotia. This award-winning Regina scribe—oft-praised for his painterly use of light and shadow—continues to raise the bar with poetic evocations of these elements, as well.

Rice explains that “the prairie creature in [him] is drawn to the farthest edges of a place,” and a 2012 trip to Scotland’s Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides to appreciate the Standing Stones of Callanish sparked his desire to experience one of the “three known Native American standstill sites.” These journeys are pilgrimages, and the writer treads carefully:

what can I say to a spirit’s repose

it’s not the language

that matters

Much of the book concerns his 2017 Ohio journey to the Octagon and Observatory Circle—“part of a series of massive geometric sites built by people of the Hopewell culture”—and other sacred sites. I was impressed with Rice’s candour—ie: his fear that “This whole trip could be a disaster”—and his philosophical queries: “ … what if [our imagination] travels without us, sailing the Earth on its own wind?” From elevated thoughts to cheap hotels and “a half-finished breakfast wrap,” he authentically engages, and senses when he’s not welcome: “waist-high tangle blocks every step. I don’t think it wants me here.”

And let’s not forget irony. “America loves its disasters,” Rice writes, yet “The Hopewell dead show no signs of battle. What they built was the result of a remarkable collectivity.” Also this: the Moundbuilders Country Club is built over the site of the Octagon Observatory Circle; visitors are allowed just four days a year.

Confessions abound, ie: “I’m not sure how to be in a country where everything sees me”. Yet everywhere, pockets of beauty, ie: a “refugium of asters/coneflowers dialing the sun” and revelations of language: “marks in the land are a language” and “the river’s like a voice that wants me to follow it.”

There’s much tenderness, including AP photographer Chick Harrity’s story about capturing his life-changing “Baby in a box” photo, and the transformative power a painting held for actor/comedian Bill Murray.

Does life put us in the path of the people, places and art we’re meant to meet? I believe so, and it’s possible that we don’t even know how often we’re saved. Sometimes the light is “too fragile,” but, as Rice understands, light works both ways, and all praise to him for also paying eloquent tribute to “the light that finds its way out of us.”

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