U ALIVE

U ALIVE
by Chelsea Coupal
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781771872836

Chelsea Coupal’s second book, U ALIVE, is the most enjoyable poetry collection I’ve read in many moons. The rural Saskatchewan-raised writer and new mother documents—through sensorial and beautifully imagistic poems, mostly written in formal styles (couplets, tercets, quatrains)—a quintessentially prairie childhood; the transition from adolescence to motherhood; our often inexplicable attractions and attachments to people; the vagaries of the months and seasons; a close connection to the natural world; and a concern about the environment.

The book possesses a self-reflective, questioning tone. Each of the twelve sections begins with a stylized poem named for the months of the year. Coupal has split these calendar poems into two columns, and rather than reading straight across the horizontal lines, the poems are best read down the left column, then down the right. In “March,” Coupal contemplates breastfeeding (“The second week I get mastitis”) and philosophizes about her life: “I could have as much time ahead/as behind me, maybe less./I wonder if everything I’ve done/equals good or bad.” Her breast milk “is the colour of salmon,/dyed by [her] own blood.”

There’s plenty of blood in these poems, ie: “Tongues wet/as blood or birth;” “Lady beetles in bleeding grass;” “blood-eyed ghosts;” “don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week/and doesn’t die;” and “blood on the sheets.” A rural Saskatchewan upbringing gives one a pragmatic perspective on death, I believe. It’s a place where one might see an eagle’s “white face red with the warm blood of a rabbit.”

Seasons are a focal point, too. In spring, “[March] lands/before rain, before geese, before seeding,/before tulips break through soil, wavy-green wings.” And in August, “Some nights the air is water/that surrounds a canoe.” How lovely. One teenaged September finds the narrator at a bush party: “We aren’t dressed/for the gentle sting of clear September night. A bonfire stains/the horizon” and partiers have “crop stubble stuck in [their] socks.”

In an environmental poem about taking a great-horned owl to a rescue, Coupal laments a prairie where “Every acre [is] maximized” and “chemical containers lie around.” The owl “Probably ate a mouse that ate rodenticide.”

I commend Coupal’s smart use of verbs: “birds flurry,” “snow shoots” and “rain swishes.” And who doesn’t appreciate a great moon metaphor? Coupal’s moon is a “pale thumbprint, creased and shadowed” and, in a particularly apropos comparison, it’s “a bullet hole/in the side of an old barn”.

The Saskatchewan Coupal portrays is the one I also experienced, from dancing “in cigarette smoke” to admiring the “wheat-husk whisper” of chickadees that land in retreating writers’ and artists’ upturned palms at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, and coveting the “honey scent” of sweet peas (“Moths in watercolour”).

Loss is omnipresent in these stunning poems. In “Same Basic Losses,” we find this truism:

We wait for the same basic losses: death of our pets

grandparents and then our parents. And when our loved ones die,

we remember we’re animals.

Sensorial, sexy, and steeped in the “small astonishment/at being alive,” I’ll savour these poems—repeatedly.

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