Colonialism, climate clash with relationality

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This article was published 25/03/2023 (1242 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From Edmonton to the West Coast and back, Nêhiyaw writer Emily Riddle’s debut collection of poetry, The Big Melt (Nightwood, 88 pages, $20), sifts through the strata of earth and history to claim the kinship and responsibility that belonging entails.

Kinship and dwelling require responsibility to the people who claim you and to the other beings (people, animals, plants) who also belong to the place. In Louise, a poem addressing one of Riddle’s ancestors, the speaker writes of Louise’s marriage to a settler: “he stayed with you until you passed. after this, he left your territory. he decided to flee the kinship web. it was as if he knew he did not belong here without you.”

The relationality that Riddle centres is interrupted both by ongoing colonial ways of being and climate change. In the poem Icy Futures Riddle uses long, flowing lines — with the exception of the word “melting,” which is rendered as a trickle, one letter at ta time, down the page — and the phrase “as long as the rivers flow” to causally link climate change to colonial violence encoded by the treaties. The poem turns and re-interprets the line, so that it goes from referring to the literal river, fed by disappearing glaciers, to “the fluid of nêhiyawak who give birth/ (not just women)” and the speaker’s connection to “ndn sisters [… .] just as much the flow, as the droplets from the mountains.”

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In her third collection, Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 88 pages, $20), Frances Boyle attends to the ecstatic, liminal and ceremonial aspects of time and the way they impact private and public histories. What results is a document in which “The new rituals/ lean into laughter, imbue nonsense gestures// with meaning.”

“What insight might I have about being a mother,/ about having a mother?” asks Boyle in Camel Hair Coat. This, one of many poems about mothering that span centuries, takes place after the speaker’s mother’s death, and it draws parallels between the speaker and her mother and the speaker and her daughter: “The chasm opened. My child, unmothered,/ jus as I’d been dismantled, unpieced,/ only a week before.”

The final poems of Openwork and Limestone are suffused with a subtle melancholic tension, which Boyle renders with characteristic clarity and vividness. “Memory is flatulent,” she writes; nonetheless, it pulls at the speaker and her sister, both explicitly and in the form of images and rhythms drawn children’s stories, even as they try to escape “A krakenwake time we try to obscure.”

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In The End Is in the Middle (icehouse poetry/ Goose Lane, 114 pages, $20), Daniel Scott Tysdal deploys a dexterity with language and a form inspired by Al Jaffee’s fold-in back covers for Mad magazine to produce something that seems impossible: a genuinely playful book about major depressive disorder and suicidal ideation.

“Daniel doesn’t know he will never grow out of it,” opens Eurydicinema. In this poem, Tysdal deploys the languages of filmmaking and myth, used throughout the collection, to explore the speaker’s long-held misconception that his experiences of depression are a temporary affliction. Eurydice may be a more truthful symbol both of art making and madness than is Orpheus, notwithstanding the cultural scripts that mean “Eurydice’s myth did not survive, except in its absence.”

Tysdal creates and inhabits a space where Mad magazine and madness rub against one another, where his students and Eurydice, John Clare and B-movie monsters and filmmakers belong to the same web of connection and where poetry is survival.

“Why bother writing a poem?” he asks, riffling through a list of reasons why poems are unsuitable and unwanted, as well as the way poems have been culturally set up to fail.

Nonetheless, he returns to the practice of writing poems as sustenance: “a practice/ that can/ break/ and/ still/ be/ shared/ can/ sustain/ and/ is/ made/new/ each/ day.”

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Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.