News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke

This month, more news, views on Imagining Ancient Women, by Annabel Lyon, and reviews of poetry books: It’s Hard Being Queen, by Jeanette Lynes; monkey ranch, by Julie Bruck; Red Ceiling, by Bridget Keating; Undark, by Sandy Pool; and Torch River, by Elizabeth Philips. Now for: An Urgent Call for Poems about Trees from Poets who Love Them, from Susan McCaslin; Magie Dominic from Newfoundland on Thanksgiving; Penn Kemp, from Dream Sequences, and Brenda Niskala on How To Be A River. from: "'Susan McCaslin'"

Dear friends and fellow poets:

I am currently involved in trying to save a very rare and special endangered rainforest in Langley by organizing some art and activism events around the issue. I organized an” Art in the Park Day” on Oct. 28th and, on Nov. 15th, over 160 students from the Langley School of Fine Arts converged on the forest to create and perform their art. These events garnered lots of local press and public interest in saving the trees.

If a local environmental group doesn’t raise $3 million by Dec. 16th, the forest, containing three species of owls, a Black Cottonwood tree that could be between 240 and 400 years old, and many species of plants and animals, will be sold for development and logged immediately. Since the 25-acre parcel of land is currently public land, I and other artists, ecologists, scientists, and environmentalists are trying to put pressure on the Langley Township Councillors to reconsider their decision. However, they are obdurate and time is running out.

My husband and I, an environmental lawyer, hope to get further media attention to the issue by organizing the following tree poem event.

If you need more context, feel free to contact me at my email. There is lots of information on the website below as well, including reports by scientists and ecologists.

I look forward to hearing from you. Please pass this on to other Canadian poets.

The poems will be put into plastic covers and hung on the trees. Published or unpublished work is fine. It’s not exactly an anthology, unless you think of the forest as an anthology. Scroll down.

All the best,

Susan McCaslin

The Han Shan Project: An Urgent Call for Poems about Trees from Poets who Love Them.

Han Shan was an ancient Chinese poet who posted his poems on the trees and rocks of Cold Mountain . In the spirit of Han Shan….

Join our effort to speak for the trees of McLellan Forest East, an endangered rainforest in Glen Valley , Langley , BC . It could be sold for private development and logged after Dec. 17th2012.

Send us a tree poem and we’ll post it on a tree in the forest. One poem per poet. Keep it to one page with your name at the bottom. Small photo of you is okay.

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This is the west coast, so poems about species such as fir, hemlock, cedar, hemlock, spruce, bigleaf maple, black cottonwoods are especially relevant.

Send your poem immediately to Susan McCaslin who can provide more information about the forest and the issue. [email protected]

Background: This remarkable and ecologically important forest will be sold by the Township of Langley for private development after Dec. 17 of this year if something radical is not done immediately to keep Council from proceeding. McLellan Forest For Further Information: http://mclellanpark.blogspot.ca/

Magie Dominic shares this: From Smithsonian Institution - The very first documented Thanksgiving in North America originated in Newfoundland, May 27, 1578. Story is from "Smithsonian Institution, Thanksgiving in North America". Happy Thanksgiving from a Newfoundlander! ______Penn Kemp says: “Just found this very kind note Susan McMaster read at the June AGM banquet!”

“The Life Membership award goes to a member of the League of Canadian Poets for a lifetime of outstanding achievement in poetry, and is awarded by National Council. Penn’s work is being recognized for the ground-breaking innovation of her sound poetry and sound operas her own remarkable invention. She is equally being honoured for her unstoppable wide-ranging and amazing mentorship, publishing, promotion, and creativity. Above all, she is being recognized for the high quality of her poetic explorations and collaborations.” Susan McMaster

Warmly, Penn Kemp

From Dream Sequins

Poetry by Penn Kemp. Drawings by Steven McCabe.

Penn's sumptuous poems are beautifully presented in this gorgeous hand-made art book. Scintillating and flowing, they draw you simultaneously outside to the big order of things & inside to the mind, heart, & deep tissues of the body, celebrating vital speech & visual image. The poems were first performed in Penn’s 2010 Sound Opera, Dream Sequins, at Aeolian Hall with Brenda McMorrow and Bill Gilliam.

From Brenda Niskala: Hi Anne: I'll be reading from my new book of poetry (yes!), How to Be a River (Wild Sage Press). Brenda Niskala is a Living Archives Matron and was a production manager for the Series.

Born and raised in west central Saskatchewan, in the Coteau Hills near Outlook, Brenda Niskala currently makes her home in Regina. Brenda has been, among other things, a nurses' aide, a community college co-ordinator, a crisis counsellor, a legal aid lawyer, a labour rep and a writer- in-residence. She currently works in the cultural industries.

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Brenda Niskala’s first full book of poetry was Ambergris Moon (Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1983), followed by a co-authored collection, Open 24 Hours (Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1997) and a number of chapbooks, including Emma's Horizon (Toronto: Hagpapers, 2000) and What Butterflies Do at Night (B-Print, 2005). Her forays into fiction include the novella Of All the Ways to Die (Toronto: Quattro, 2009) and the linked short story collection For the Love of Strangers (Regina: Coteau Books, 2010), nominated for the City of Regina Book Award and the CBC Summer Reading list for Saskatchewan. She is now collaborating with Barbara Kahan on a film script featuring an opinionated macaw, and working on her next (well, first) novel, which will introduce the pirating adventures of a Viking ship in about 1065. Brenda has read to audiences across Canada, in Finland, and in England. In 2011 she presented at the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw.

Why is the press called "Wild Sage"?

Wild: free to breathe, move, sing, feel, create...

Sage: spare kind of beauty, wisdom, scent of nature, diversity of type, seeds of growth, joins sky and earth...

http://www.wildsagepress.biz/books/how_to_be_a_river

Review of It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, by Jeanette Lynes (Calgary: Freehand Books, 2008) 96 pp. paper

Lynes grew up on a farm. It’s Hard Being Queen is her fourth poetry book. She published Left Fields (Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak and Wynn 2003), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award.; The Aging Cheerleader’s Alphabet (Toronto, Ontario: Mansfield Press, 2003); and A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway (Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak and Wynn, 1999). She was awarded the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and first prize in the Grain Postcard Story

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Competition. She co-edited The Antigonish Review. She was a visiting artist/writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek, and the Saskatoon Public Library, as well as a Faculty Member at St. Francis Xavier University and the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

This collection of sixty-one poems was dedicated to the Writers of Saskatchewan, “You helped me hear the music again.”

The songster was genetically predetermined to succeed, “

-Open your mouth- reach deep into your throat, it’s all there: fish, bird, gem, boy, song. (“Dust, Musings”, p. 11)

She has an affinity with Gospel music, taking for her calling as “blues singer” from the convent school “voice, dust” (p. 15) in addition to the fact “the rhythm method had always/meant something else to Mary O’Brien.” (p. 19) She reveals “A record is a palimpsest, and incest/of sound.” (“A Brief History of Vinyl”, p. 18) The result is “a Dust Rush”. (“California”, p. 38)

The companion poems of “The Studio: Memphis” deal with the business of recording, producers, hairdressers, and session musicians who appear along with the day-to-day events of touring. She receives fan mail as well as hate mail. She is a perfectionist, abused by her father, because “She’s all things to all/people.” (“You Know You’ve Made It When”, p. 28) Lynes created a concrete shaped-poem “Festival of Light, England, 1971”, in keeping with the venue of Westminster Abbey and an invasion by the Gay Liberation Front.

In “Fortune”, the poet ponders other successful public figures, Edith Piaf, Peggy Lee, and Frances Gumm (Judy Garland) who suffered. The lifestyle means there is “blood” in the day. There are multiple allusions to tragic intonations, a sacred act, combined with orphic riddles, “Good Dust” or Quaaludes, martinis (“Dusty Nail. Dustini”) and “a Bloody Mary O’Brien”. (“Medicine”, p. 52) “Her wrists are no longer safe” (“Laurel Canyon, 1975”, p. 49)

She experiences homophobia and “Mary Go Home” (“Nightmare of the Decade”, p. 55). A sanitarium, ironically, offers her “Release” (p. 56-7) She acknowledges her hating the band Aerosmith but loving “Disco” (“Brief History of Disco” and “Disco 2”, pp. 58-59). By the 1970s, she experiences “lost” years, when even her voice may fail, and a found poem is an unsigned draft apology to the Queen of England and sister Princess Margaret. (“From Buckingham Palace”, p. 61).

By the 1980s, she has performed for money some awkward, desperate acts, since she has lost respect and has visible signs of ageing. She joins a 5-step program and sings backup under a pseudonym “Gladys Thong”. She resembles road kill as a small animal in the scheme of things. The “Springfield Gull” is “Sooty” but “White-Soul” (“Ornithology for a Sentimental Planet”, p. 78). Her music was rediscovered with the film “Pulp Fiction”. Other public figures who died, tragically, were Princess Diana and Grace Kelly. In retrospect, she was a 1960s icon, a Lady of Icons,

Shag that, a form of death was what it was, melody’s carcass picked clean.

(“Forgotten Light”, p. 76).

Springfield, born Mary O’Brien in 1939, was known as the White Queen of Soul. She died from cancer in 1999. Some of the poet’s sources were: Warren Zane’s Dusty in Memphis (NY:

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Continuum Books, 2003); Lucy O’Brien’s Dusty: The Classic Biography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000); Edward Leeson’s Dusty Springfield: A Life in Music (London: Robson Books, 2001); Peggy Valentine and Vicki Wickham’s Dancing with Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield (2000); Annie Randall’s Dusty: Queen of the Postmods (NY: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Patricia Julianna Smith’s “’You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield”, in Smith’s edited anthology, The Queer Sixties (NY: Routledge, 1999).

CONGRATULATIONS TO JULIE BRUCK!!!

Julie Bruck is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry for her book Monkey Ranch.

The winners of the Governor General's Literary Awards were announced at the Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique du Québec in Montreal.

Here is the official press release.

Review of Monkey Ranch, by Julie Bruck (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2012) 88 pps. paper $19.

In I, the collection opens in medias res, with a domestic scene, in a happy household (“This Morning, After an Execution at San Quentin”). The visit to the zoo, although the howler monkey emits “a sound more retch than howl”, prompts the response “Monkey singing” (p. 15). This is in keep with the epigraph, “Sort of, said the monkey merchant.” (–Russell Edson). The zoo is full of children. (“The Mandrill’s Gaze”).

The comparison extends to an elementary school and a locked ward (“Why I Don’t Pick Up the Phone”). A house has been sold (“Maison Vendu”), thus: “No more agents in SUVs, /or transfers or titles. /No strangers in the kitchen.” (p. 18) A suicide occurs (“At the Music Concourse”, p. 19). In “The Change”, the mother shrieks at seeing a mouse.

In II, the poet employs a You Tube video for her contemplations on “Elizabeth Bishop’s Room”, which includes lines from Bishop’s prose memoir, In The Village. She celebrates Chinese New Year (“Gold Coin”). The child exchanges her baby teeth (“Milk Teeth”). In “Goodwill” a new employee experiences his first day on the job. Sibling rivalry is exposed (“The Trick”). Two suicides are recounted. The epic dressing scene before battle or, in this case, a party, precedes her parents’ divorce. The poet reflects on the details, given her current knowledge of what is to come. A bookstore conversation takes place near Used Cooking, Used Film, Used Poetry, and Travel Lit. (“New, Used, & Rare”).

In III, a school-shooting is imminent. The poet sees the news on BBC. (“Please”). The poet records those preparations. (“A School Night in February”). History is destined to repeat itself (“Should You Ask”). The Twin Towers fell. (“Scientists Say: After Neruda”). The war ends. (“Newsreel” was adapted from “San Francisco Celebrates VE Day 1918”, a film in the “Shaping

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San Francisco Series”, The Pralinger Archives, according to the poet’s note). A boy is missing. “Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad” was printed by The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition as part of the Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a large broadside collection, at the Jaffe Centre for Book Arts website. The proceeds are donated to Doctors Without Borders. The poem was adapted from a Washington Post story. According to the poet’s note, this historic centre of the literary and intellectual community was destroyed by a car bomb in 2007.

Wildlife, such as a moose, a few raccoons, and a mole, reclaim a burned-out subdivision. (“After Wildfire”) There are SWAT teams, crime-tapes, trauma units, and bodies in Montreal. However, her estranged father ignores the impact. The poet uses irony. (“The News Feed”). Certain afternoons appear to be isolated, especially at an outdoor bistro. (“Islands).

In IV, the poet recalls her family’s monkey farming as “a screaming/kaleidoscope of stripes chased/stripes”. Her mother preferred chinchillas. (“Monkey Ranch”) Missing persons' cases abound and eventually we are not “too young to strip the world of miracles.” (“Cold Cases, Adult Division”, p. 56). Parents attempt to tame a baby with self-soothing techniques. (“How To Be Alone”). The poet catalogues a father’s wardrobe with the underlying comparison of affection withheld, “leaving/his bewildered hand groping for a pocket, /and finding it basted shut.” (“My Father’s Clothes”, p. 61) The speaker seeks a cover story for a boy’s fall, while the mother is bent on protecting her daughters. (“Boy At The Window”) The poet lists household duties and chores in an epic epithet. (“The Help”, p. 63) Racing forms and an Easter Egg Hunt are combined (“Final Season: Family Day, Bay Meadows Racetrack, 2007”, p. 64) The Jockey from this setting appears with “Comments from the San Francisco Chronicle’s” daily horse-racing stats (“Today’s Handicap”) and as “a bowlegged/slip of a man” (“The Winningest Jockey”, p. 66)

In V, a found poem from a menu misprint (“Eggs Roll”), inheriting a teak set of desk ornaments (“The Wooden Family”), and a Great White Shark released are the stuff of poetry. A teen is “An unfinished letter. /A subway token. A dime. That vertigo.” (“Girl in Her Brothers’ Bedrooms”, p. 72) The poet depicts an Air Canada Toronto airport waiting room. The setting allows for “carpeted ramps/of late-night flights on feeder airlines”. In addition, the speaker anticipates “when we clutchers of boarding passes/will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets.” (“Men at Work”, p. 74) A live radio broadcast on public art is less than enlightening (“Dead Air”). The poet recalls her mother’s admonitions. (“Ocean Ridge”) The horse performers have been replaced by pygmy goats and stampeding fans. (“The ‘World-Famous’ Lipzzaners”) The poet desires a pick-up truck with an accompanying dog. (“The Greater Good”)

This is her third collection of poetry. Bruck is the author of The End of Travel (Brick Books, 1999) and The Woman Downstairs (Brick Books, 1993). She has work in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Walrus. She lives with her husband and daughter, and two goldfish. ______

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Annabel Lyon’s first novel, The Golden Mean, (Toronto: Random House Canada) was published in 2009 and was the only book nominated that year for all three of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, which she won. It was also named the MacEwan Book of the Year 2010/11. She published short stories as Oxygen (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000) and three novellas as The Best Thing for You (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), which was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She lives in New Westminster, BC.

Of Imagining Ancient Women, by Annabel Lyon, Foreword/liminaire, Introduction by Curtis Gillespie (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press and Canadian Literature Centre, 2012) Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series 68 pp. paper $10.95.

Lyon comments:

I realized very, very early on in my research into the ancient world that I had embarked on a two- book project. The Golden Mean is a male novel representing a male world: the public world of politics and warfare and intellectual ambition and the battle for influence...I always knew I wanted to write a companion piece that would look at the female side of this world: the world of slaves and kitchens and hearths, the domestic world, and also—in contrast to the cool rationalism of Aristotle—the religion, superstition, and magical practices that were traditionally associated with women.

Review of Red Ceiling, by Bridget Keating (Regina, Saskatchewan: Haigos Press, 2012) 95 pp. paper $17.95. The poet acknowledges Paul Wilson, Managing Editor of the press and a poet in his own right. Her work recently appears in Spring, a publication of new writers from the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. She has been writing poetry for a short time.

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She writes lovingly of the gynocentric: ageing trees are “thick, arthritic...knotted and bowed” (p. 6) Further, “Now your brown hands are gnarled branches” (“Waterfowl”, p. 17)

In “Garlic Woman”,

She said each day the soil gave her a place to steep her shaking hands. (p. 22)

In “Birth Memory”:

Your grandmother tells you dying is harder than having babies (p. 7)

In “Stigmata”,

When we first bled, our uterine lining shedding, our bleeding, we were told, was not holy, but a curse. (p. 9)

In “Vaginal Prayer”, her surgeon asks her permission, before his rounds

of cutting and cauterizing— surgeries for sagging bladders, hysterectomies, cervical biopsies. (p. 10)

She describes a Scald Crow Woman, who buries placenta,

sows blood beneath a willow, sings blessings, hands kneading earth, fibrous roots.

“The story of the girl in the wind”, (p. 14)

The poet explores the natural and the supernatural world: of frogs, bats, sparrows, pigeons and crows; coyotes, deer as prey animals, and the moth’s transformation, as “the soul born from the skull’s black passage” (p. 29)

Her poetry examines Catholic liturgy and sacraments, the Last Rites, the Relics of the Saints, Mass, a mural, and hiking trails named for saints (at “Montserrat Monastery”, p. 83)

“Years ago, divers found a car with two men inside—’’ (p. 12) Thus, her youth and innocent childhood were shattered by brutal experiences; there are “pewtered bones of men and women” (p. 16)

The title poem states, “Some stories were never spoken, but carried in muscle and sinew.” (p. 59) Others are “Kitchen Stories” about births and hysterectomies, or infidelity (p. 77).

The collection is devoted to her Irish Grandmother: in “I watch my grandmother” (p. 27) and “How to write poem for your grandmother who is dying” (p. 50).

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There are a few poems for her father: “Accident, December, 1996”, (p. 18); “To reconstruct a face” (p. 24) pertains to her father’s job in the embalming room, ironically, interrupted by his daughter’s concerns over her doll’s face. In “St. Anne’s Cemetery, June 1981” (p. 39, her father was digging a grave when he was struck by lightning. In“My father” (p. 56), he hooks and traps, gathering bodies.

The poet observes that Ignacia is a Woman Buried Alive and children die, hence she reveres her daughter, in “A Letter to my Daughter” (p. 35). The poet appears as feminist, in “Sedna” myth, “her father pushed her overboard, /cut her fingers to release her grip”, (p. 65) “Lolita in a Shoebox”, (p. 67) is about the town’s library ladies.

There are elaborate “Mating Rituals”. The spirits of women searching for lost children in “Cihuateteo” (p. 79); with “Night, sweating womb of summer”, at the altar of the Black Virgin, in “Montserrat Monastery”, (p. 83)

The poet is unflinching about “women buried alive” (p. 54), in “Hunger”, “it’s the mouth/that men fear most, our tongues, /our voices, our teeth.” Women treated as female dogs, the proverbial bitches, forced to mate, the ones who run or fight. (p. 45) In “Hunger II”, an abused woman, whose horses are also abused as a consequence, “Because she left, /he starved the horses.” (p. 47)

There is “Our Lady of Tundra Swans”, the woman/with the scar on her back”; from fire- scorched skin and seared flesh; her boreal womb, her birds, their swollen, spring bodies.” (p. 49)

Keating lives with her son, two dogs and two cats, in Regina. Her work also appeared in Wording the World (Puncher & Wattermann, 2010) an Australian anthology of emerging and established poets). She has an MA from the University of Regina and has worked as a Sesssional Lecturer at the University of Regina, Luther College, and First Nations University of Canada. She is currently working on her Ph.D. which explores representation of Mayan women in the Zapatista resistance movement. This is her first book

Review of Undark: An Oratorio, by Sandy Pool (a blewointment book) (Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2012) 96 pp. paper $18.95

The epitaph was derived from the existentialist Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”. In the early 1900s, women painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials . They later developed severe medical conditions but were told it was syphilis that was causing their symptoms. The supervisor died of radiation-induced anemia. The lawsuits were unsuccessful, women died before receiving compensation. This radium dial-painting industry was only halted in 1954 and the plants shut down in 1960.

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We read about art in the service of industry. In “1910”, “Undark doesn’t get dark in the dark.” In “1916”, “undark takes care of the dark, so you don’t have to.” The sales talk pervades/persuades. In “1912”, “Manufacturers recognize/the value of Undark.”

Part II is Half-Light, in “1921” “But even the power of radium must stop somewhere.” In “Nox, Newark: 1928”, “Of course there were inspections—.’’ In “Nox, New Jersey: 1998”, “the cemetery clicks into being.” Apparently, “The history of radium is beautiful—Marie Curie”. Madame Currie is associated with the discovery of radium and her death was caused by her research activities.

“They will accuse you of venereal disease, force words into mouths, like wounds

In “1921” “I have told you that the story of radium/is an unfinished story”.

In “Nox, Toronto: 2011”, there are the interiors of a hospital with “The art deco and Paint//chipping off the sill/as the cold comes up”.

She concludes with “Nox, Epilogue”:

Since then, I’ve hated the dark. I never turn off the lights.

A Reader’s Aid is a list of dramatis personae, in order of appearance: The “Undark” is a radio personality; a Chorus or Voice-Over; the poet Sappho (612-570 B.C.); and “Radium Women” are a group of factory workers.

The documentary value is counterpoised with the narrative of a scientist and inventor of the deadly paint, by the name of “Sabin” (1882-1928) whose story, from “i” to “vii”, is sequentially told; while the context is retold, from prehistory and/or ancient Egypt, using illiterative concrete panels and patches of italicized quotes.

Sandy Pool is a multidisciplinary artist and Killam scholar, who holds a degree in Theatre Performance and English from University of Toronto; as well as a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is a doctoral student in Canadian Literature and Poetics at the University of Calgary, where she is the editor of Dandelion magazine. Her first book Exploding into Night (Toronto: Guernica Press, 2009) was nominated for the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She was anthologized in The Best Canadian Poems (Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2011). She works as a librettist and voice work artist.

Review of Torch River, by Elizabeth Philips (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2007) 120 pp. paper $15

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The opening poem is “Breath”, musing on “Who’s to say this life isn’t the eternal life?” Some of the responses depend on strength or heft; others on the pivot of exhaling, of pleasure or release (each morning on the river) near Pelican Rock. The caesura is associated with the mythical bird, on the South Saskatchewan. The bird is female, “opens her great wings”, much as “breath in, ///breath out—“(p. 11)

Part One. In “Before”, the poet plays with an incremental refrain, “you/can only get there by water”, joining this up with another, “I’ll punctuate this/with the real and the imagined.” (p. 15) The lovers, whose “motes in your eyes//and then in mine”, become “warm and cool/and warm.” (p. 16)

Part Two. In “The Hanging Tree”, the poet is distracted from a lover’s visit by the exigencies of an ill horse (the animal will soon be buried). She reflects on the wind, “redolent with twenty years/of spilled grain and dung and dust.” (p. 38)

Part Three. In “Lullaby”, the poet employs an extended metaphor to indicate their lovemaking:

I surrender as we float, a living raft, pulse tied to pulse, both of us near and both of us far. (p. 55)

Part Four. In Prelude”, the question is, “will she outwalk memory”? There is much “she cannot write down”. However, there is “the big body” as well as “the little body” and which will prevail? She extols the virtues of faith and doubt, “the heart tempo”, by interweaving “of what is seen/with what is imagined.” (p. 93) The pairs may not stay married. On her figuratively last page she rediscovers the diurnal round.

In the title poem, the poet observes an unknown woman, “she grows smaller/as the sisterhood of trees” (p. 110). The setting is the forest, with a bear, doe and fawn. “She should be wary, prepared, /alert, //but she isn’t”. (p. 111) There is an ambiguity about her identity, as her own sight is “fraying” due to shadows. The breath pause insinuates itself:

and nothing less, each gust exhaustive, and not one false move. (p. 113)

The poem blatantly and brazenly resists:

Never mind. This is not a story. There is no beginning and no end. (p. 114)

The river imagery is phallic, lovingly attending on her:

But first, she’ll find that the river means to stay as it goes,

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that it’s deeper at night, a throat sheathed in silt, the current occult (p. 115)

Philips acknowledges Don McKay and Jan Zwicky.

Elizabeth Philips is the author of three other collections of poetry: Time in a Green Country (Regina: Coteau Books, 1990); Beyond my Keeping (Regina: Coteau Books, 1995); and A Blue with Blood in it (Regina: Coteau Books, 2000), She has twice won the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ Poetry Award for the best book of poetry published in a given year. She has extensive experience as an editor and teacher of creative writing. She has edited over 30 books of poetry and fiction for various publishers, and was Editor of the literary magazine Grain from 1998 to 2003. She has taught creative writing in various programs across Canada, including the Sage Hill Writing Experience and all three of Banff’s creative writing programs. She has worked as a freelance magazine journalist, publishing articles in a wide variety of magazines, such as Equinox, Western Living, and Saskatchewan Business. She has published poems in Canadian, American and British literary magazines and has work in the Best Canadian Poetry in English (2008) anthology. Elizabeth Philips has read in various venues across Canada, including Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Halifax, Fredericton, and Antigonish. She was recently appointed Director of the Banff Centre’s Writing with Style program. She lives in Saskatoon.

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