News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke

This month more news (on SkirtsAfire: Edmonton’s Women’s Art Festival) and reviews of Stealing the Flowers of Evil, by Liliane Welch (1937-2010); Penn Kemp’s Dream Sequins, (reviewed by Katerina Edwards); Colleening: Poetry and Letters, by Colleen Thibaudeau (reviewed by Penn Kemp); and exile at last: Selected Poems, by Chava Rosenfarb, edited by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler.

We welcome new members who support the goals and objectives of the Feminist Caucus. The topic of our 2013 panel will be Women Poets and Their Male Poet Mentors (who helped them in their writing careers.) If you have not contributed in the past but have an interest in this topic, please submit a 100-word proposal and email to me at [email protected].

Edmonton Women’s Art Festival SkirtsAfire was a festival that empowers, celebrates, develops, supports and showcases women in theatre and other art forms. It created a platform for Canadian women’s stories and the female voice – women writing, directing, designing, choreographing, painting and putting music to their own stories.

According to Catherine W. Cole It was a glorious opening night! SkirtsAfire had a great turnout at Hodson Community Hall for GWG: Piece by Piece. The show was amazing. We could not have found a better show to open SkirtsAfire then this one, celebrating the grace determination, resilience and beauty of ordinary women working in a factory. Extraordinary women. On International Women’s Day.

SkirtsAfire, HerArts Festival 2013 Jannie Edwards and Julie Robinson directed an evening of spoken word and music for the SkirtsAfire, HerArts Festival 2013, a 4-day extravaganza of music, theatre, visual art, dance and magic! All to celebrate International Women's Day...all to celebrate women in the arts. “Body Language: A Fusion of Spoken Word and Music” featured a collaboration of poetry created and performed by outstanding women, who bring a broad range of experience and backgrounds together into this celebration of women's voices and stories. These talented women are: Audrey Shield, Erika Luckert, Felicity Collins, Laurie MacFayden and Medgine Mathurin. Complementing the poetry are songs of peace, freedom and equality sung by Edmonton’s own Notre Dame des Bananes Choir. For more information please see: http://skirtsafire.wordpress.com/

Review of Stealing The Flowers Of Evil, by Liliane Welch (Ottawa: Borealis Press, 2008) 84 pp. paper $16.95. Liliane Welch was a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Federation of NB Writers, and a correspondent member of the L’Institut Grand-Ducal de Luxembourg. She divided her time between Europe and her home in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she resided with her husband, Cyril, until her death on 22 September 2010. http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/w/welch_liliane.html Welch (20 October 1937 - 22 September 2010) was born and raised in Esch / Alzette, she received her primary and secondary education in the tradition of Luxembourg, but then relocated to the U.S.: first as an exchange student (American Field Service), then for her post-secondary education (B.A. and M.A. at the University of Montana, PhD. at The Pennsylvania State University). After teaching at several U.S. institutions, she

St@nz@ E-Newsletter April 2013 moved to Canada in 1967 to teach French Literature at Mount Allison University until her retirement in 2003. Since the spring of 1975 she devoted her creative energies mainly to the composition of poetry, of which over twenty volumes have been published. She died after a long battle with myeloma. All her life a lover of literature, she was still enjoying Dante's masterpiece on her deathbed. Cyril Welch, husband Colette Welch, daughter. Final farewells were at the Crématorium in Luxembourg on the 24th of September 2010. http://www.inmemoriam.ca/view-announcement-206237-liliane-welch.html These are spare but never parsimonious poems, instead embedded with symbolical significance. There are twenty-two poems in the first section “First Snow”. The poem of the same title deals with the eider down of angel wings, gleaming crystals, powder, sugar, fluff, of desire. The poet is, at certain junctures, preoccupied by the opportunity to “do over” or assertively introduce a course correction, in the event a second chance is possible. For example, she muses on a next or after life. The setting is a European wonderland. The sound is Vivaldi. Her body is “already redolent from love”, because of Casanova. There is a binary of “For the sake of my lover”, followed by indications of her life choices. Although she has travelled far from the Old World to the New, and, on occasion, complains she has left poems “unattended and unwritten”, it is clear that many more poems have been completed in her numerous collections, such as Anticipating the Day, (Ottawa: Borealis, 2006), in addition to the present selection at hand. One of her companions is conversant with poets, philosophers, and the symphonies of Beethoven, especially the Pastorale. He entertains with a prayer book and oracle. The poet has a close association with the popular mantra Eat, Pray Love, in this instance, dining at parties with works of art. A friend makes possible affection, language, and forbidden books. The Impressionist painters in Paris render her body on flame. The axis of age enters, at sixty-nine, wishing for a rebirth, while acknowledging her final home. At seventy, she wants illumination. The preparations are seasonal and seismic. (See also: her book of essays and memoirs, Seismographs, a work of travel prose). She composes an elegy, a letter, and sonnet. Two of her favourite venues are at the Library and in Bookscapes, when, as a consequence, the stories of her youth return. Her mentors are the great French Master poets, not contemporary literature, whose “wishes, enticements, requiems, and invocations” haunt her. She peruses the French and the Russian novelists, ancient classics, such as The Iliad, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. Satan, Lucifer, or Beelzebub, known by as many names, “flails”. One of the reasons for her travels is the Christian artwork, including architecture, Gregorian chants, and the Esch-Uelzecht. She only learned English in eighth grade, and words were animated, “resplendent, released, redeemed.” (p. 33) Poems are prayers for immortality, whether sacred or profane. As co-author, Welch has published two volumes of literary criticism on modern French poetry, Emergence: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Address: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Butor. (Brampton, On: Bald Eagle, 1973). In the second section, she pays attention to a cosmic interplay of characters, Angels, Lucifer, and God, interact with the elements. The observer is indoors, contemplating rain as divine retribution. A lover is famous for his infidelity. His beloved is like an Egyptian Queen, while his wife shares a palace. A highwayman serves as a rampaging rapist. A couple experience shame, anger, loneliness, and madness. She examines the elements of marriage, including loud arguments, the diurnal rounds of drudgery, such as menial household and domestic tasks. The section, “Winter Sun” and a poem of the same name were inspired by an Alex Colville painting, by which she explores the tools of her trade, paper, pencil, eraser, pen,

St@nz@ E-Newsletter April 2013 and writing. An ancient sibyl, walking a dog, is her emissary to an open book, blank pages, light, and dreams. Of Flowers of Evil, the poet reflects on her lost and missing leather-bound edition, which has been her constant life companion. She experiences its fragrance, touch, and pulse. (“Robbed”, p. 44) The irascible poet is invoked, in spite of his muttered complaints. He becomes a symbolical “air field” because ascent is essential to the muse. (“Rimbaud, p. 53) She adds Whitman and Dickinson to her poetic influences. She compares raccoons, “burly,//lumbering miniature bears”, which resemble ourselves, as creatures who scratch with the hands.” (p. 56) The third section of twenty poems contains letter poems for “Dear Mother”, an essential role model who passed away at the age of ninety-five, in 2007. Borealis has published other books of her poetry: Gathered in Memory’s Hand (2006), Dispensing Grace (2005), This Numinous Bond (2003), Untethered in Paradise (2002), Unlearning Ice (2001), The Rock's Stillness (1999), Frescoes (1998), Fidelities (1997), and Assailing Beats (1979). She co-authored criticism on modern French poetry, and published Seismographs: Selected Essays and Reviews (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1988.) Her writings are included in anthologies and translated into other languages. She taught at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. http://www.borealispress.com/Author/aid/322/Liliane%20%20Welch Anne Burke

Penn Kemp will next read in London at Landon Library, launching From Dream Sequins on April 24: see http://www.londonpoetryopenmic.com/upcoming- readings.html. Her new book, Jack Layton: Art in Action will be launched May 23 at the Aeolian Hall with contributors reading their pieces: http://aeolianhall.ca/events/jack-layton-art-action-book-launch

Review of Dream Sequins from CD Night Visions, Penn Kemp, London: Pendas Productions, 2011. ISBN 978-1-897163-16-0. CD $15.00, Print $20.00. Review by Katerina Fretwell. This review of Dream Sequins was published in Prairie Fire. Dreams, those wondrous portals into other possibilities, that which exists within the supra-real, recurring/lucid/sequential, are potent prophesies, all seeing. Penn Kemp's sound opera, Dream Sequins, was first performed at the Aeolian Hall, London, 2010: Bill Gilliam piano improvisations; Penn Kemp lyrics and voice; Steve McCabe art; Brenda McMorrow voice, melodies, guitar. This sing-along multi-art, elegantly sequined magic carpet floats us the audience into Kemp's mystic dreamworld where we will be transformed. Gilliam's luscious Brubeck-rich chords, McCabe's otherworldly drawings and McMorrow's riveting contralto and folksy guitar enrich Kemp's flightfully imaginative and alchemical dream realms. The opening piece, Dream Life of Theresa Harris, touts this 19th century woman's unprecedented adventures with husband St George Littledale in remote Tibet. Succinct phrases contrast the stern upbringing and pioneering escape: high tea replaced by rancid yak tea ... confinement of finery hindered by lace necessities interwoven through visuals, voice and music. After this realized dream, the opera finds Kemp dreaming in her backyard to rain pinging on her vinyl greenhouse roof. Choral interludes, song, vocal duets, evocative imagery and verbal puns: Nat's (Goldberg's voice on tape) and fungus gnats stir the wild in us, set up the mantra-chorus: Reclaim the land. Reclaim the light. Reclaim the oracle. Declaim the sight. (Realized the Dream Spreads into my Back Yard). The third work, Paraclete (Holy Counselor), continues the call to the unknown: the wild poetic in all its

St@nz@ E-Newsletter April 2013 true/ form sequence of beaded dream sequins. Bill's dissonant notes, Steve's two flaming tailed heads and Brenda and Penn's punning prophetic chorus end on a koan: Play a gain or Pray Begone! Pair again, paragon! Embrace the mystic call or be gone! Another dreamlike subversion, Skipping Class (#4), conveys Penn's manifesto: beyond the curved boundaries of this floating world ... I fabricate poems as the dream wheel turns. The vocal acrobatics of Penn and Brenda, Steve's amorphous figure fronting a distant city and Bill`s rippling interludes enrich the repeated theme: Skipping stones across the pond. Skipping ropes that pull us to other dimensions beyond the known. Missing, what`s Missing (#5), with its profound O-sounds and vocal twining, asks the central question: How could so much wisdom evaporate with the body`s decay? The vocal, piano and visual delivery swoop us back in time. From that minor key emerges the jazzy syncopated sixth piece: Recurring Dream Theme Reflecting Mimesis. A benevolent sun god and moon goddess gaze upon a sunflower, our yearning to merge with all that could be underscored by our wrong/ turns over and over since the Neolithic: wisdom lost from both human and communal bodies. Tonally a comic cosmic relief, Recurring Dream Theme (#7), showcases Penn`s aural pyrotechnics yowling/ prowling like a White Goddess stalking the dark to Brenda`s melodies, Bill`s syncopation and Steve`s profiled face sprouting tree whiskers. Still in darkness, All Things Considered (#8), in the Solstice's Moon of the Long Night, tells us to trust the opening up process. Steve's I Ching-like art: broken hearts superimposed over repetitive boxy lines enhances our own dream-work. A wake up, Rise and Shine! (#9) begins with Bill's lyric piano and Brenda's sonorous refrain: Can you hear what they are crying? In Penn's verbal pun, 'they' refer to scaly amphibians and scary Neanderthals. The Old Ones exhort: are we too early or too late? We must break old patterns to remake the world into a more compassionate, cooperative and eco- friendly habitat. The Pageant (#10) continues to propel us to something larger than the single self ... Singly or together our dreams/ direct us, as if night-given leads us to true script. Spiritual growth is indelibly linked with poem, dream and shadow self. Brenda's guitar, Bill's improv, Penn and Brenda's threaded vocals and Steve's Kahlo-like cosmic goddess set the scene for our transformation. Homing to the Given (#11) warns of our trend toward entropy and then, reiterating the incandescent motif, proclaims that finding the electric cord, We switch on the earth/ the globe lights incandescent. Steve's angry multi-headed torso recalls Cerberus guarding Hades or the Ancient Bird Goddess, our necessary descent in order to move forward. The Kenning (#12) asks the final question: how do we transform? Brenda refrains: By becoming earth becoming. To commingle with earth, we need New eyes, new ears as Penn echoes. In Steve's art, a goddess sits with moon and stars in a tower and above the sun and clouds, all personified and interconnected. Even while rehearsing in the Aeolian Hall, the troupe receives confirmation that the hall is also sacred space, reflected by a knife slashing a cobweb to release a Monarch butterfly. The final piece, In Light, in lush metaphors, depicts how we live in light, how without shadow, there is no fear. In a pun on Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Brenda sings and Penn intones just that bearable lightness of being just, intuiting that spirituality and justice must be conjoined for genuine enlightenment. This multi-media (poetry, song, piano improv, guitar, art) and multi-spiritual (pagan, Buddhist, Christian: Paraclete) visionary, oracular sound opera is as timely now as Delphi's Pythias was in ancient Greece. A tremendously talented troupe: Penn Kemp, Bill Gilliam, Brenda McMorrow and Steve McCabe weave Kemp's Dream Sequins into an unforgettable magic that lingers long after each hearing or performance. Don't miss

St@nz@ E-Newsletter April 2013 this chance to face the dark and dream yourself into your higher self while being entertained and delighted. Penn Kemp’s reminder: Poetry Stratford will celebrate Colleen on Sunday, April 21, 2:30 pm at Stratford Public Library. “I’ll be reading Colleen’s poems from Four Women (Red Kite Press), talking about her work and our connection and reading a couple of poems dedicated to Colleen, one of which I call “Inspiritrice”: Appropriately, I’ll be launching Jack Layton: Art in Action at the Stratford Library event as well. Colleen was a long time NDPer; we often drove her to local events. And her son, James Stewart Reaney, has a lovely piece in Jack Layton: Art in Action, describing the sign Colleen kept in the upper window of 276 Huron. That sign could well read, “ALIVE”. Review, COLLEENING- The Poetry and Letters of Colleen Thibaudeau By Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012) Music by Stephen Holowitz and Oliver Whitehead Directed by Adam C. Holowitz With Donna Creighton, Paul Grambo, Chris McAuley and Patsy Morgan Presented by AlvegoRoot Theatre Company Location: The ARTS Project, London ON Stage Manager: Tanya Ullyatt Set Design: Sue Parke, March 1-9,2013. This review is by Penn Kemp. In Colleening, Adam Corrigan Holowitz has compiled a wonderful, wandering saga of Colleen Thibaudeau’s life, as witnessed in her letters and poems through more than half a century. Colleen was a delightful and insightful poet of the “common magic” she saw in the everyday life her words made extraordinary. Born in Toronto on 29 Dec 1925, raised in St. Thomas, Colleen died in London on Feb 6, 2012, the sonorous taped voice of Bill Exley informs us by way of introduction. She preferred the ravines of St. Thomas and the fresh air of Flesherton to London, a place she felt was bogged in its own marshy saucer. But she happily spent many decades here, living with her husband, poet and playwright James Reaney, on Huron Street.

Jamie has long been celebrated for his poetic plays: it is poetic justice that Colleen’s work has now been translated onto the stage as well. Susan Reaney, daughter, and Susan Wallace, daughter-in-law, have done admirable research and editing in weaving a way through Colleen’s writing, transcribing it into a living whole for us. They have included commentary by Stan Dragland and Herman Gooden, as well as an interview conducted by Jean McKay, Stan Dragland and Don McKay for Brick Magazine. Colleening is a welter of anecdotes, allusions and reminiscences that flow through Colleen to the four actors on stage. They all at some point voice her words so that the text becomes a stream of Colleen-consciousness, accompanied by Stephen Holowitz’s appealing piano.

In Colleening, art is the articulation of perception and Colleening is the perfect title for any work about and by Colleen. It is a term invented by Margaret Avison, a legendary poet and long-time friend of the family, who in this one word captured Colleen’s essence. Colleen not only verbalizes; she IS verb, in full spate. She lives within a smoke ring of free association— a woman of many nouns as well, of dancing, sparkling reflection. Colleening brings to life Colleen's free-wheeling voice, her sense of wonder and humour: what an inspiritrice she continues to be! Colleen was a sound poet, and she’d have loved this keening and calling forth on stage. Her calling was a gift of free rant, a balloon rising through clouds that clustered like an aureole about her head. Her mind careened in spirals, in what seemed impossible directions all at once, but always (almost always), it returned to her theme.

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The actors capture Colleen’s will o’ the wisp spirit: she peers; she appears; she disappears and reappears through the four voices on stage. All that is missing (thankfully!) are the literal smoke rings that would play about her head. True, there is no direct narrative through line to the play, but then the delight in hearing Colleen was in following the progressive twists and turns of associative thought till it wound back to a sharp and salient point. The narrative of the piece is not in logical progression, but in the spiraling of an observant mind at play. The beauty is in the precisely observed detail, the keen perception: Colleen’s aperçus lighten the listening ear. Her Miniatures encapsulate a gift of celebrating the moment and embedding it in a larger perspective. She could flit from comic to cosmic and back again in a phrase.

“People are always asking me about archetypes,” Colleen declared. After all, she and Jamie had studied with the authority on archetypal criticism, acclaimed scholar Dr. Northrop Frye. “I don’t understand archetypes,” she continues. Colleen’s mythological framework was more Blakean: she elicits another poet’s cogent phrase: “no ideas but in things”. In one of the most realized pieces of the night, the poet finds sympathy in an ordinary moth’s steady passage up her screen door, reaching the top at last.

Colleening is not bound by time, though it begins with reminiscences of Colleen’s childhood adventures in St. Thomas and Artemesia Township. Scene after scene flits by, as actors wander on the stage and off, caught in their own world, in digressions which perfectly suit Colleen`s impromptu style. Allusions fly fast: catch what you can and don’t worry about what you miss. For instance, Peter Stevens and Eugene McNamara are poets from the English Department of the U. of Windsor, offhandedly mentioned twice by their first names. Who would know? It takes all four performers to encompass Colleen’s expansive voice. The exception is her father’s war stories. Played by Chris McAuley, he whirls us into riveting tales of the First World War as he captivates his daughter, here played by Patsy Morgan.

The original music by Stephen Holowitz and Oliver Whitehead raises the text to a new dimension: nineteen of the poems are set as song. What a pleasure to hear Stephen Holowitz accompany the piece throughout on a grand piano! He has a light touch. I can well imagine a lively oratorio based on simply stringing these nineteen pieces together. The art songs by Stephen Holowitz and Oliver Whitehead rhythmically reflect the natural inflections of Colleen’s speech patterns, just as she herself was able to transpose her thoughts onto the page. As a creature of words, Colleen would have delighted in the movement of her work into song.

What most lifts this production off the page are the singers and their mesmerizing duets. Both Creighton and Grambo emote as well as the actors. Stagecraft is evident in their timing, their harmonies and movement: their interaction creates the illusion of real relationship in virtuoso performances. Such vocal choreography is free-form and yet precise. The ensemble work is enthralling, particularly in the percussive vitality of “The Children and the Storm". I would have liked to see more such collaboration. Here are a few lines from the poem in The Artemesia Book (1991 to whet your appetite:

Children before the storm ran wild - Like pink lightning, like pink cotton dresses, came their cries - They shrieked, they sang, they swung on the silver Hydro wires

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Tussled on the yellow grass Laughed, wrestled and scuffled...

I’m biased but I believe poetry yearns to jump off the page and cavort about the stage, as, in this production, it happily does. Here’s to performance poetry, and the poetry of this performance! Colleen and Jamie would both have loved Colleening, I have no doubt. London is blessed to have such cultural icons as have lived in her saucer. The triumph of this play is that it acknowledges our own local heroes/heroines, and carries on the tradition in such a grand collaboration. Here’s celebrating our talent, both past and present, in this production of Colleening!

Thanks to the AlvegoRoot Theatre Company for reviving Colleen through her words, as in the final scene of the play, ALIVE. You can get a taste of the power of Colleening on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54v1ZWrrBQw&NR=1&feature=endscreen and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOhuDDGtJA&NR=1&feature=endscreen. As Patsy Morgan says, “She needs remembering”. It would have been lovely to hear Colleen’s own voice, but Donna exactly recalls the lilt of Colleen’s particular cadence: hear her in “Watermelon Summer”, http://vimeo.com/60785229.

A version of this review is up on http://www.thebeatmagazine.ca/index.php/theatre- reviews/1560-colleening-the-poetry-and-letters-of-colleen-thibaudeau.

Poetry Stratford will celebrate Colleen on Sunday, April 21, 2:30 pm at Stratford Public Library. Penn will be reading Colleen’s poems from Four Women (Red Kite Press, 1999) and talking about her work and the play. Also reading from Four Women are Marianne Micros and Gloria Alvernaz Mulcahy. Jack Layton: Art in Action, http://www.quattrobooks.ca/books/jack-layton-art-in-action/, will be launched. Contact: Charles Mountford [email protected]. http://www.stratford.library.on.ca/Poetry/poetry.html. Stratford Public Library Auditorium, 19 St. Andrew Street, Stratford, Ontario, N5A 1A2, 519.271.0220. Free. The reading is sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets.

Marianne Micros published a new book of poetry, Seventeen Trees (Guernica, 2007) which focuses primarily on her search for ancestors and family stories on several trips to Greece. Marianne has performed her poetry throughout southern Ontario and New York State and has taught Creative Writing classes and workshops in Guelph, Waterloo, and London, Ontario. She has a Ph.D from the University of Western Ontario and teaches Renaissance, Medieval, and Scottish literatures at the University of Guelph. She is married and has two daughters. http://poets.ca/members_data/Marianne%20Micros

Gloria Alvernaz Mulcahy is of Tsalagi Aniyunwiya ancestry and was born in the Monterrey Bay area on the Pacific coast. She became a member of the League of Canadian Poets after her first book of poetry-Songs that Untune the Sky. She has a PhD from the University of Maryland and is presently at the University of Western Ontario. http://www.kegedonce.com/first-nation-authors/gloria-alvernaz-mulcahy.html

Social Justice Recounted, ReStories: for Colleen Thibaudeau Reaney, Poem by Penn Kemp.

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She accumulated tales to blow them out as smoke ring leading you through her long alliterative spring garden. She invited you to dance with words; her card was full. Droll, a wit not acerbic but trolling for pertinent phrase. Language tripped slyly over the page in play of possible, not settled but including errant sound, all probable puns. Her genes are storytellers, Acadian and Irish shaped new to be all the more accurately embellished with that gift for Capricorn lateral leap across lacunae incomprehensible till the story revealed itself so far, the scene laid out clearly. When home could include everything, how would you not describe in gloried detail each strand of whole? Circuitous Led straight to the point, a maypole of ribbon encircling the sun, a sequence as consequential as spoken history. Remember who was where and when and why. What did happen. A matrilineage of friend and family lore never to be forgotten but transformed in each telling. The tail coiled round itself till springing straight. A recall to tell the midden of memory, reminded. She invited us in with an easy laugh and watchful eye while she would embroider without rancour bleak rock of Grey County or green Elgin, brushing hair away. More to tell from inexhaustible well. Sea-green eyes in an Irish face observed not judging but birdlike to leap upon the treasure of salient particularity. Stories sped through alternative universe, spiraled beyond galactic connection to return spangled in original dress back home, where we the recipients of kindness would drink tea, reclaiming the smoke of ancestral aeons and be welcomed. (On the occasion of her wake, 276 Huron Street, London ON March 17, 2012) * I feel Colleen’s spirit sprinting airily through this poem, gallivanting it off tangentially, lighting on a special mobile in a nostalgia of books and china, earrings, knickknacks, a lifetime’s stored collection. Though now I notice her presence, she wafts away self-conscious, sweeping back to dust, into corner with the slightest of backward glances, unslighted but cautious in this new state where she sees all without herself being seen almost most of the time but remarked upon, remarks I hope she relishes. Though how wryly she would have commented on this newly neat place, uncluttered by aged habits. Hands, fluttering, flying up to her face, the voice vague yet precise as silk, a storied silk she spins. March 18, 2012 “Social Justice Recounted, ReStories… for Colleen Thibaudeau”, Penn Kemp, Prairie Journal, Calgary, Alberta. Editor Anne Burke. Issue #57, Fall 2012. Also http://poets.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Feminist-Caucus-June-20121.pdf

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Review of exile at last: Selected Poems, by Chava Rosenfarb, edited by Goldie Morgentaler (Oakville, Ontario: Guernica Editions, 2013) 70 pp. paper $15. In “The Woman”, the poet offers a paradigm about her double, “Who is that woman,/ alien and awesome?” She mourns ageing, as the alternate traces “ruts and her furrows upon my face”, as well as “with the graying strings of her faded hair”. The simultaneity “of me, / whose body is full of sweetness/ known only to gods” is striking because one of the comparisons is “as the skin of Venus/ just born and rising/ out of the sea’s dainty shell.” (pp. 64-5). Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) was one of the first female novelists writing in Yiddish. This is a collection of both previously published and unpublished poems, as well as poems translated from the Yiddish, either by the author or the editor. According to the Preface, the editor (who is the author’s daughter) arranged the poems chronologically. A 1971 collection of the author’s poetry was never published. She received an honourary degree from the University of Lethbridge, in 2006. She wrote a trilogy about the holocaust, The Tree of Life and a play, The Bird of the Ghetto. The poet wrote her own introduction because she believed “books lacking such...are like houses that one enters directly from the street, still wearing one’s shoes and galoshes.” Conversely, with an introduction, “a volume of poetry functions like the anteroom to a house, a vestibule...where one may...catch one’s breath, pause for a minute to absorb the atmosphere of the dwelling one is about to enter.” (p. 11) Rosenfarb writes, “The smile is the smile of another”; “The table is set by another”; and “The joy is that of another.” (“He Asked Me”, p. 32) As a new person, she arose from the concentration camp, a displaced person, “doit émigrer”; she composed The Song of Abram the Waiter, about her perished father, a poetry collection and a diary, Ghetto Poems and Fragments of a Diary, as well as The Ballad of Yesterday’s Forest. In Part I “Echoes Of The Ghetto” the first poem “Freedom” was written in the ghetto, in the winter of 1940. The second “Ghetto Lullaby” was written after the Sperre in the Lodz ghetto, in September 1940, when 15,000 children were collected in one week and

St@nz@ E-Newsletter April 2013 deported to the death camps. The poems “Last Lullaby” and “Last Days in the Ghetto” were composed before the “liquidation” of the Lodz ghetto, in August 1944. In Part II “Questions of Faith”, she ponders, So He must come now and prove to me That one can burn and be burned And still remain God (“I Would Go into a Prayer House” (p. 41)

Even her faith is “asleep” (“Twilight at Dawn”, p. 39) A holy wanderer lies “detached from his body by pain” (“Oriental Ballad”, p. 37) In “A Prayer”, she intones, “Be with me”, “Shield me”, and “Descend into me as a miner/descends into the mine with his light.” (p. 35) In Part III “Poems Personal and Domestic”, she writes of onion skin “gardens, white vellum “rivers”, and paper-white “fences”, and concludes, “But my paper fate keeps me fettered/to its blessed and cursed paper power.” (“My Paper Worlds”, p. 47) In “Laugh With Me”, she embraces “And then we shall enter, Desired One, / into the lull of a holy Silence.” (p. 50) In “Landscape”, “A willow kneels in my heart” (p. 52) In “A Dress for my Child”, she grieves, “my mind, distracted, gone astray.” (p. 55) She addresses legions in “My Children”, as “Sweet, consuming, hungry godheads.” (p. 57) In “Nocturne”, her pen has grown “silent now” (p. 59) She compares an aquarium of dead and dying goldfish with “How quiet. / Of all the quiet deaths/I’ve known only one other like yours—/my mother’s. (“To a Dying Goldfish”, p. 71) The collection concludes with the title poem, in which the speaker refers to herself in the third person, “So she had gone, /forgetting to cry, /without saying goodbye, /even to the dog.” (p. 75) This poem was written later than the war and exists only in English. There are notes on the poem and a bio/bibliographical summary of both the author and the editor. Goldie Morgentaler is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge. Her translation of her mother’s Survivors: Seven Short Stories won the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award, in 2005, and the Modern Language Association’s Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies, in 2006. She was a columnist for the Montreal Gazette. This is an impressive achievement, the act of creation in the face of immense sorrow and loss. Her father died just twenty-four hours before the Day of Liberation. Her mother, who survived the war with her two daughters, died in 1959, after arriving in Montreal. The poet’s marriage ended, by 1965. Anne Burke

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