Book Review
The Questions Posed to Life by Death, A Canon for Three Voices
- Libby Scheier (Author)
Kaddish for My Father: New and Selected Poems 1970-1999. ECW Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Susan Musgrave (Author)
Things that Keep and Do Not Change. McClelland & Stewart Ltd. (purchase at Amazon.ca - Lorna Crozier (Author)
What the Living Won't Let Go. McClelland & Stewart Ltd. (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Susan Knutson
Lorna Crozier’s What the Living Wont Let Go opens with the "Names of Loss and Beauty," mouthing persimmon, catalpa, piers japónica—words for shrubs and trees gathered in elegiac salute to transitory life:
Magnolia petals shine so much like flesh
without the stains or softness
aging brings,
it hurts to watch them fall.
In the end, the collection returns to images of plants, "Wildflowers," short-lived beauties, "Western Wild Bergamot, Larkspur, / Closed Gentian near the Manitoba border." What would Sorrow look like, asks the speaker, if it were a flower, "bloom [ing] in rich abundance this July":
If I touched the sepals with my tongue
I’d say anise and then repeat it, an aftertaste,
a hint of time. Wild near the marsh
I find a kind of Rue where only yesterday
leopard-spotted frogs leapt in imitation
of the heart’s strange fondness
for what is lost.
Time, the poets are singing again, will sweep all things away. Carpe Diem. Some themes, after all, remain the same. Perhaps this sameness is evidence of their importance. Certainly Lorna Crozier’s treatment can be recommended.
Her poems are divided into three sections, a device which aids in making the book quite teachable, I think. The first section assembles poems limning moments of deepest beauty and sharpest loss: sex between one’s much younger parents, in "The Night of My Conception 2" ("Sweet Jesus he cries, /and I’m the one who answers"), or the sensations of a man who stands in his own garden, listening through his open bedroom window, as his wife has an orgasm with some one else. "The Wild Swans of Bled" orchestrates a pause, as a brother and sister slip out of a hotel where their parents are drinking, to marvel at the beauty of the moon, the swans, the lake: "Neither of them knew / he would be gone within the year." It is Yugoslavia, in 1989.
The second section, "Counting the Distance: Another Family’s Story," tells the stories, tragic and ordinary, of one family—a grandfather whose madness is brought on by the Great War, a beautiful sister whose own mother calls her "whore":
In me a man’s been everywhere a man can go. Not my father. He gentled me. Say fox, he said. My eyes turned green.
The poems of the final section, "Walking into the Future," are loosely linked by images of a present in which the speaker lives in relationship with her lover, the two of them moving together into age, into time, and the signs of it: the parents who are dying, the son who is grown, the flowers which come and then are gone. What the Living Won’t Let Go includes four poems which were part of a chapbook called The Transparency of Grief, the winner of the 2nd annual {m}othêr Toñgué Press Poetry Chapbook contest and published by the press in 1996.
Libby Scheier’s Kaddish for My Father is also largely focussed on the questions posed to life by death, particularly in the first section, "Yud of My Heart" written in response to the death of the author’s father in 1997. Several powerful stories intertwine in this collection; of these, one of the most extraordinary is the story of the speaker’s coming into closer relationship with her Jewish faith. The centrality of this movement can be appreciated in the fact that the poem declares itself to be a Kaddish, a ritual mourning prayer not traditionally spoken by women. In "Tallis, Tefillin, and a Dream," she narrates one sequence in this development:
After my father died, on June 26, I took my grandfather’s tallis, the prayer shawl of my father’s father, home with me. . . . In the purple velvet case next to the tallis, in their own black velvet drawstring bag gone greenish with age, were my grandfather’s tefillin—black, brown and ochre leather prayer boxes with leather straps; I took them, too.. . . With the women’s and Jewish renewal movements, some women have begun "to put on tefillin," as they earlier decided they had the right to don prayer shawls, also traditionally worn by men.
When she takes the tallis and tefillin to her friend Justin, who is studying to be a rabbi, he tells her what the objects mean and how they are meant to be used in prayer. She prays. "I did say the prayers, did speak my devotion to God, my binding to God." That night her father appears in a dream of rich reconciliation. Leaving behind the pain and abuse which marred their relationship in life, the father and daughter together enter a landscape of "lush, green, countryside—rolling hills, wide meadows, tall and leafy trees ... [where] a couple, man and woman, greet us and welcome us into the [horse-drawn] wagon. He was handsome, with black hair and a beard. She was plump and wore a kerchief. They were colourfully dressed in an old-world gypsy or peasant way, and were very warm, kindly, happy to see us." This poem dream, with its simple but brilliant language, illuminates in a startling way what it might mean, in our present spiritual condition, to honour our ancestors—an almost archaic phrase which is redeemed for me by Scheier’s text.
Although many of the poems in this collection are in verse, many others, like the one I have quoted from, are actually little stories or prose poems, and these are the ones that I personally like the best.
My nine-year-old son told me last night that he intends to keep his plush Simba forever; I identify, of course, as I would like very much to keep my son forever, although I am aware that all things change. Things That Keep and Do Not Change, I think, and my heart goes out again to Susan Musgrave, whose husband, Stephen Reid, has just been convicted of a serious crime, while Musgrave has written another book which speaks of loss and pain in a language as sparkling and lucid as the freshest British Columbian creek. There is enormous beauty in her poems, and considerable depravity; which suggests something about life.
This book is also divided into three parts. "Part One: The Laughter in the Kitchen" is in fact the grimmest of the three, flecked with the terror of torture and death, lightened only by a graceful sadness:
The laughter
in the kitchen reminds me: grief
is a burden, something to be shaken like the foxgloves in our garden, stooping under the weight of the seeds. I’ve learned the lessons of pain ....
The title poem of "Part Two: Do Not Make Loon Soup" (subtitled, "Valuable Advice from The Eskimo Cookbook") is hilarious, and the section as a whole is richly peopled with friends who are lovingly remembered. There is a funny, Canadian parody of Wallace Stevens’ "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The final section, "Things That Keep and Do Not Change" is equally accomplished, literary and even formal in tone, at the same time that it permits a certain level of biographical reading, for example in "Eight Days Without You," dedicated to Stephen. The book as a whole is darkly brilliant, fit company for What the Living Won’t Let Go and Kaddish for My Father, all three collections of elegiac and highly accomplished poetry.
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MLA: Knutson, Susan. The Questions Posed to Life by Death, A Canon for Three Voices. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 24 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #169 (Summer 2001), (Blais, Laurence, Birdsell, Munro, Jacob, Chen). (pg. 152 - 154)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
