Blurred Sunlight Shimmering on Wet Rocks
A Review of Laurence Hutchman’s Swimming Toward the Sun. Collected Poems: 1968-2020.
Guernica Editions (2020)

I first heard Laurence Hutchman’s work read, by him, on a stage in Hazel Park, Michigan. We were in a small theatre in the sprawl of suburban commercial buildings that sets the standard sense of urbanity for Metro Detroit. Together in a country that knew little of us, yet welcomed us whole heartedly in small kitschy theatre, I felt myself drawn into distant and comfortable worlds. I understood then what I still see now in his Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems: 1968-2020 (Guernica Editions, 2020). Here is a man whose lifetime has been filled with work that carries on the great poetic tradition and one that furthers that tradition by adding a beautiful and important Canadian voice to it. 

There is great depth and passion in Hutchman’s work. Among one of the most accomplished poets in Canada, his works have come to reflect much of the life of letters to be had in this country. With his work these reflections are driven not solely by the culturally dense streets of Montreal and Toronto. Although they are there as well, it is not the focus. It’s rather the man at the centre, the one that has come through it all. Here is Canada, here is our lives from the roots. With Hutchman’s works we witness the reflection of our lives. Deep multi-lingual country roots, small towns, the view is Al Purdy-esque in its vision of land and experience being at its centre. Sure, these are poems of the self to an extent. But they are more, they are sharing and connecting in ways that many oft praised contemporary poets are unable to accomplish. As such these are poems of the people, recognizable outside the halls of academia, but imbued with a depth of knowledge and experience that makes these poems at home in the classrooms of the nation.  

One of the most endearing parts of his work is the manner that he utilizes language and most specifically places them alongside each other. Hutchman is concerned with languages and with mixings of memory and our experiences through them. In his poem about his family history, “Lost Languages,” he beautiful creates space for both the sound and literacy in mixing languages. “Sounds ripen in the mouth:/beschuit, pindakaas, boterham//sinaasappel … lekker … ah … a language of violets/orchids, solariums, and that tobacco …/” Here, like many other instances of French and other languages, Hutchman allows us to hear the words, see them on the page, and then open up to concrete experience through his use of imagery. We find footings in familiar and wonder in the connection to the sound and the personal. 

Hutchman is also clearly a poet of places and people. They play critical roles in his work and act, most often, as grounding points. And these aren’t simply limited to his Turtle Island-based life. He is an immigrant, from Northern Ireland, and as such the manner in which one can find them both unstuck from place and firmly attached to it run throughout his work. His collections of the now gone small town Ontario town of Emory are well-known enough. They place both history and place as nebulous and impossible to completely revisit in our collective experience. The physical aspect of memory and recollection is central to both our existence and to the work of the poet as Hutchman sees it. 

With such a diversity of lyric and narrative pieces, some full of honest experiential level detail, some filled with the earnest poetic sense of fiction and possibility, it could be difficult to find an over-arching theme. This is because Hutchman’s work does not simply follow a single principle of poetics or writing, but rather grows and changes over time. We witness phases, shifts, and returns. I liken the reading of this book as a study of living, breathing, and very vibrant living being, like a meandering river, the migration of birds across a continent, the seasonal wandering of antelope on the Great Plains. In this one book of collected works you can follow the growth of not just a poet but a soul through its pages. We witness a departure and return and then final departure from Hutchman’s hometown of Emory. We sense similar things with his talk of Atlantic Canada, and again with familiar and now departed writers. Yet there is more here than these expectant poetic turns. There is a cohesive ars poetica when the totality of the pieces is looked at as a whole. I find an apt summary of Hutchman’s work in the closing stanza of his “Poems at Hoagie”

“It is out of this exile we write our songs,/when the poem suddenly centres us/ and flows out past the large windows,/opening onto the river where the blurred sunlight/shimmers on the wet rocks,/ and purple flowers cluster./ We watch the men on Fish River/cleanly casting their lines.” (pg.153)

We as readers are thus left with the concrete visions of real tangible world, one that we share rather generously with Hutchman. From French-language cloaked travels down Atlantic Canadian roadways, to quiet moments between the speaker and poetic royalty such as Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, and Fred Cogswell. 

This is a collected works, not a complete works, which leaves us with a less than exhaustive view of Hutchman’s work. This is not a problem, despite the fact that some of my personal favourites of his work might be absent. Here I am thinking of his earliest work in Storm Warning 2 and some of his most recent works. That said, we are still left a fairly expansive view of a long and still unfolding career. And for poets, for those interested in the arc of Canadian Literature, here is an insightful look into the community of writers and the context they emerged from over the last part of the previous century and well into our current one. Here is one finely produced and edited volume of one Canada’s most important poets and writers of the last five or six decades. An importance that shines through in its lyricism, its connection to the grand western poetic traditions, and to the finer points of how language and poems can record the nuances of our time upon this turtle shell. And the words on the page come through in honesty and fine melodic narrative lyricism that sparkles like an Irish storyteller in the shadows of a small-town maritime pub. This collected works is an absolute must for collectors and scholars of Canadian poetry. But it is also a true to delight to read, one that acts as both a history of Canadian verse, and memoir to one of the most important voices working and living in the field. 

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Fields of Light and Stone
by Angeline Schellenberg
University of Alberta Press (2020)

Fields of Light and Stone is a book of poems through which Angeline Schellenberg pays homage to her elders, their complicated histories, and her connections to them. The book is dedicated to “all who seek comfort in story/ with love for these imperfect saints” and from the start, Schellenberg connects herself to these “imperfect saints” through the land she grew up on and her grandparents’ stories.

Half the book is dedicated to her maternal grandparents and the other half to her paternal and throughout memories, biblical quotes, and religious ceremonies as well as letters and historical documents create and inform the poems that are personal and detailed, but also rich with deep contemplation.

“Everything there is to say” is her opening poem, which begins with “Everything there is to say/ has already been said about trees.” and what a grand statement, but then to go on and say more, and link “The Siberian elms (like my ancestors)” to those who “would not stay in one place.” From this beginning the poems move through time and memories, as if the narrator is sitting by the bedside of each of her grandparents and while listening to their stories, interweaves her own memories and lived tales. The book ends on “The First Trees” as if trees are structures creating a framework for these poems to live within the bounds of, “Lighter than oak or regret, aspen crates are perfect/ for carrying the books our ancestors/ have yet to write.”

Schellenberg’s careful layering of moments is captured in “The Night of the Fair” where, after being caught in a rainstorm, “we ran to her condo,/ mini-donuts dripping/ and sat four-generations deep” there they talked of Tsarist Russia “and my husband’s bald chest peeking/ out of grandma’s mint-green robe.” Throughout the first-half the grandparents letters are used as touchstones, and journals as historical documents.

Sometimes shifts in pronouns “you” and “I” made me pause, read more slowly to discover who was being referenced and what the clues were. Not all stories comes easy, as in “Between Seed and Harvest”: “After great-grandma dies and you marry her sister/…she will try to starve your daughter and leave/ your family broken./ There are no fairy-tale endings.” The you here, her grandfather.

This folding of the narrator’s life and her family’s weaves throughout in poems like “Deep Breathing” where the narrator gives birth, and that breathing is equated or recalls the grandmother’s last breaths.

A narrator with sometimes childlike-wonder and adoration of these elders moves through the relics of their lives. In the second half, her Oma and Opa are so much a part of the young Schellenberg’s life and stories shape those “Fields of Light” : “She perches on the edge/ of a piano bench/ in a Field of Light.// It’s 1919 in a Ukraine/ before famine and Oma/ is singing.”

Later when the Oma dies, the poet wonders, knowing her Oma will not meet her future children as she faces death: “is that sheen/ the morphine, or the rheum of angels?”

A deep and contemplative book that shuns linear telling favouring voice, and brief recollections from here and here and there and lets them resonate, like keepsakes – letters and recipes, her Opa’s German bible – through shifts in time and perspective.

Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth, her fifth book, came out with Caitlin Press in 2022. Yvonne’s poetry books include As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015), and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017) is her travel memoir exploring body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, B.C., and the past Artistic Director of the weekly reading series Planet Earth Poetry. She lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Yvonne mentors and teaches in poetry and prose and has students zooming in from across North America.

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Dan Lockhart joins Shelley McAneeley to discuss his new work Tukhone, the Winsor area, and much more.

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by Anna Yin

When I received the book cover and the page proofs of Mirrors and Windows from Guernica Editions, I was overjoyed. I was no stranger to this joy, for I had previously published five poetry collections; yet this time was different. It was like a long laborious childbirth, finally, safely, delivered. Holding 280 pages of the contributions of the 59 poets whose texts were included—as well as the two-way translations (English to Chinese; Chinese to English) in a beautiful and sophisticated mirror-layout, I reflected on many detours that I had taken on the winding journey of this translation project.

Robert Frost once remarked, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Then why did I spend years translating poems and make the great effort to publish them into book form?  I saw it and continue to see it as necessary. I believe it to be what I might call “a loyal love,” not just a consumption of time and labor, but a journey of collaboration of words mapping, discoursing, exploring, and restoring. Translation needs the courage of “To Be or Not to Be,” the interrogation of “Other” and “I,” the isolation and unity of reflections and explorations. It involves culture, history, and politics to bridge the messages for allowing deeper mutual understanding, communication, and more…I wanted desperately to be a part of this exchange.

Yet without any precise GPS for navigation, one can easily get caught up in detours and get lost on this poetry translating odyssey. Looking back, I recognize detours were necessary. I turned to Every Step Was into a New World, and there I found Al. Moritz’s intuition and philosophy; and when I followed A.E. Stallings’ Mistake, I understood even mistakes were an opportunity to grow and to learn; in Dana Gioia’s Thanks for Remembering Us, I smiled at his amusing love episode triggered by an unsuspected error. In The Flaw by Molly Peacock, I witnessed: “a hand saying through the flaw, / I’m alive, discovered by your eye.” Yet, Peacock’s Why I am Not Buddhist puzzled me for days. Next, I ran into chaotic torments in Allan Briestmaster’s “Ask dying fish what difference: fire and mud …” and in Lan Lan’s “But already too late – / Around the world the tall pillars /Are collapsing…”  My translation pilgrimage entailed traversing various labyrinths among historical courses and cultural examinations. I could get lost but still, I had to keep going.

I remember Moritz’s semi-autobiographical Poetry: “though as it assures you it abashes you / with crushing beauty…” and I translated it in 2013, but found several mistranslations later, after our email exchanges. Then with an online Poetry in Translation discussion, we traced the unconscious side to Dante’s journey through the deepest of dark forests. All those collaborations helped me to rework my translations.  When I flew to Italy in 2019, I found myself waiting in a long queue in front of St. Peter’s Basilica and I was reminded of Richard Greene’s “I was thinking of Michel-/angelo almost daily – Pietà / as essence of the only art I seek…” I instantly reviewed my translation; at Pompeii, I heard Ronna Bloom’s “Salve, Salve, Salve…” echoing beyond the ruins; I regret I missed Tombeau de Keats and only could imagine George Elliott Clarke’s “Language fabricates intimates..” and picture the ghost of Keats inking letters that bloomed in the vast Roma field.

It takes years to get there—to get to the heart (and the head) of a poem! When at last I thought I had fully understood their poems and felt confident in my translations, I heard Gioia’s Do not Expect: “And only briefly then / you touch, you see, you press against/the surface of impenetrable things.”  So, what do I know? How confident am I?  What has still been lost, after many revisions and discussions with these poets and their thoughts re-thinking— seeing windows open and close as if by themselves and then open again—mirrors reflect, obscure, and spring to life again? Where can I detour? Where can we detour?

I found C.D. Wright’s poems were the most difficult to translate. Upon completing the book, I was still perplexed. I tried to learn “the art of losing,” although I believe I stumbled upon the clue to her Only the Crossing Counts: “Frankly my dear, Frankly my dear, Frankly”; I made my final translation. Unfortunately, when she was still alive, I had not confirmed this with her. Now I leave it as it is, I believe that the final choice is truly her call, her autobiographical voice.

Tantalized by Peacock’s Peach, I had the good fortune to discuss it with her in detail. I also had the joy and nerve to invite other Chinese translators to translate the same poem and shared an online hot debate to exchange different translation values, interpretations, and even mistranslations. The reward I received from these collaborative processes was that I grew in confidence to translate and transform the poem in a Chinese romantic way, “a red tinge, with a hinge,” to a renewed world.

While translating the renowned late Chinese modern poet Luo Fu’s poems into English, I constantly thought of “The personal is political” in a larger sense. I was stunned by his arresting images and symbols. His grief of “the clock, / is constantly / killing itself…” reminded me of inevitable tragedies in history and inspired me to write The Great Cold and other poems. For his poem “讀詩十二法” (Twelve Ways of Reading Poetry), I made extended image enhancements and applied such techniques as pen poetry, make poetry, shape poetry, engrave poetry, compose poetry…with compatible imagery in twelve varied ways, so the poem never repeated his expression “寫詩” (write poetry) in my translation. I hope this is my special effort to pay my great homage to him and respect for his work and render the complex layers of humanity and cultural background implied by his poem. Additionally, I used Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese for his original to reflect its multifaceted cultural and political meanings. Luo Fu greatly advanced beyond several generations of Chinese poets; even with his shortest poems, we can perceive his grim humor, sharp insight and linguistic play all informed by modern Chinese culture, politics, and philosophy.

Scientifically, any image we see in a mirror is the image in the past. Translation seems the same: No matter how long poets want to claim that Poetry is timeless, we read poems with the language and the cultural context related to special moments or historical periods. Thus, translating a poem is to “Make it New” and “Make it Known” in another language. It is such a thought-provoking and word-collaborative process that it demands “a love so dark / you have to long to pierce it repeatedly” (Moritz). Like the “Eros, / raddled asteroid, lumpish and erratic, / on a loopy path” in Advice to the Lovelorn by Alice Major, I have struggled to find directions, but I truly believe that for a peach, even in its mirror-image, the translator should let readers taste the juice of it.  Clarke claims: “the struggle for Beauty is never ‘history’”. I believe translators should, like the poet, strive to recreate its beauty.

I hope with Mirrors and Windows I have fulfilled the role as both a poet and a translator. Yet I have deliberately left a few “flaws” or unsolved “slipups”, Yes. That was and remains my plan. I hope readers will pause, detour, and uncover them, then they begin to debate: “Am I alive or lost in translation?”

Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and has authored five collections of poetry and one collection of translations: Mirrors and Windows (Guernica Editions) in 2021. Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from USA and three grants from Ontario Arts Council etc. Her poems/translations have appeared at Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, Literary Review of Canada etc. She has designed and hosted various Poetry Alive workshops with multimedia since 2011 and they have been well received in classes in person and online. Find her online at annapoetry.com

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TreeTalk
by Ariel Gordon
At Bay Press (2020)
ISBN-10: 1988168279
ISBN-13: 978-1988168272

First of all, TreeTalk is an innovative poetry collection. While most entries are from Gordon, many others come from quotes or members of the community, as poems were attached to and later collected from an elm tree in Winnipeg. In creating this collection of poems, Gordon slowly transitions from being a writer to being a curator and finally an arborist. TreeTalk seems fairly random in its assortment of poems in the beginning, but as the collection grows and branches out, patterns emerge. The poems work in tandem, creating a discourse about community and the relationships between nature and humans. Gordon uses short forms packed with imagery and depth to produce these patterns, growing the book one leaf at a time in a way that keeps the reader interested the whole time. 

The connection between plants and humans is in lines such as “I am shrinking like a violet” and in poems which do a taxological breakdown of Winnipeg and elm trees. In some cases, Gordon explicitly compares herself to plant life. In cases such as the taxonomy lessons, one must consider the two poems in relation to make the most of the collection. This comparison of poems is often a necessity, as some are not strong on their own. For example, a sense of community emerges from the quotes used throughout the collection, as one states “Why do you fight to save the elms… they are all going to die anyways” while others claim “we may never see trees of this size in Winnipeg again” combined with a quote praising “Little towns that worship big elms.” It is this clash of perspectives, the inclusion of poems from passersby, and the attention paid to Winnipeg specifically that make the elm and this collection a kind of living artifact for the city, intertwining the two forever. However, these poems by themselves are nothing to write home about. 

In addition to a sense of kinship between the city and the elm, Gordon also adds a sense of dread about how capitalism views the tree. This sentiment emerges in lines such as “I’m sorry for what we are doing to you. I want us to be better” and poems which outline “the utility of trees” which discuss how humans consume wood for “barrels, boxes, crates, furniture…” In these poems, Gordon makes the most of her economic forms, transforming the simple elm into a martyr for the city of Winnipeg. 

Lastly, I must discuss the use of form and space. There are often pages with as few as three or four lines which is kind of an ironic waste of paper given the critique of consumption. One whole entry for example is “I am shrouded, cooled. / I am canopied, in good / company. I am treed.” It is poems like this, standing alone in the middle of a page, which leave me wanting more. The empty space could turn into the tree itself if Gordon had used more concrete or emblem poems. Even these three-lined poems, presumably the haiku mentioned in the book’s intro, were a letdown to a reader of Japanese literature. They often lack a kireji—the cutting word on which haiku depend so essentially—and are too heavily influenced by the “I”. 

At the end of the day, however, this critique of form is my only gripe with the collection. Gordon presents the themes in the book with an interesting variation in media, and the idea of creating a collection of poetry with the community is an innovative idea that Gordon masters. The collection is an artifact of the community, and provides well-written commentary on the relation between humans and inner-city trees. It is a collection I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of short forms, an arborist, or a Winnipeg resident. 

Skylar Kay is a not-so-new writer who has a passion for Japanese forms, specifically haiku. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including Autumn Moon Haiku Journal and Ephemerae. 

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Nautilus and Bone by Lisa Richter
Frontenac House (2020)
ISBN: 9781989466124

I’m usually drawn to poetry books that feel like old friends: collections that put music to my own experiences of domestic prairie life. Especially during a pandemic, when my concentration is faltering, it takes a strong lyric to pull me into an unfamiliar narrative. Lisa Richter’s poetic retelling of the life of Yiddish-American poet Anna Margolin, with its sensuous language and fantastical images, did just that. 

Nautilus and Bone, a member of Frontenac’s 2020 Quartet, is the Toronto poet’s second full-length collection. As she explains in her introduction, Richter’s kinship with Anna Margolin (the pen name of Rosa Lebensboym, 1887–1952) includes the fact that Richter’s great-grandfather was a Margolin (she imagines him handing Anna his name like a string of pearls) and that in Anna, Richter recognizes her own parents’ wild and sensitive spirit. 

Writing in the persona of Margolin, Richter labels the collection an “auto/biography.” Like trying to extract flour from cake, it’s impossible to discern where Anna ends and Lisa begins. Margolin’s poems and the records of her life meet Richter’s memories and imagination in a delightful blur. “I look in the mirror, cough up my snarling double. / She sticks to the glass and demands compensation” (98). The book itself is a mirror: is it Margolin or Richter looking back at us? 

This is particularly true in the poems aptly titled “Marriage” that pair Margolin’s terse poetic lines with prose poems that expand the spaces between Margolin’s words. 

Within each poem, there are other meldings, as inner and outer worlds flow together: “I fitted my mouth around your short / stout stump, tasted the sea salt- // tinged wind, blousing cool through a hotel window –” (39). We find a mingling of the human and the natural, public and domestic, in “molasses crowds” becoming “the sluggish river that floats // me home” (40). 

The world of Richter’s imagining is a magical place where “the grandfather clock metronomes me into wishbone sleep” and “vertigo lifts me in its beak” (29). She takes us from Europe to Palestine to New York, through neighbourhoods equal parts comical and dire, in which “three crooning drunks share a single pair of pants,” a girl is instructed to “take [her face] off and put it on again,” and the “newsboy [fishing] for his childhood” finds “a human thumb” (32). 

As she transports us into both Margolin’s physical setting and her state of mind, Richter’s words hold more than their weight in meaning, the way “swell” in a single passage can suggest wombs, wounds, and waves: 

So much bounty, we could hear the sculpted legs groaning. In those days the poems would not relent, swell 

after vertiginous swell, my open wounds wild-stung with salt. An ice-blue pain I came to savour. (98) 

In describing Margolin’s marriages, male and female lovers, and unwanted advances, Richter’s skillful use of enjambment plays up the innuendo with line breaks such as: “I am a phoenix many men have tried to mount // on their walls” (47). 

Nautilus and Bone invokes the senses in ways that are both fragrant—the “coffee’s earth-deep / buttered loam” (51) and, as Anna explains why she is an only child, guttural—“what man / can stomach a litter of rotting pears – / all that split, mealy skin, oozing pulp, / squandered juice in a lonely orchard’s shade” (20). 

Like brittle bone and shell, these poems preserve the memory of a revolutionary poet—a legacy both fragile and enduring. 

Angeline Schellenberg’s Manitoba-Book-Award-winning debut, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), explores the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’sPoem of the Year. Host of Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline recently launched the elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone(University of Alberta Press, 2020).

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