A few weeks ago, I mentioned how much Naomi’s Atlantic Canada reading has impacted the books in my stacks. (Check out her project here, along with pages dedicated to the Halifax Explosion and regional literary awards on Consumed by Ink.) I’m also enjoying my Here and Elsewhere project, which takes me around the globe, to a new city each month. Anyone who is looking to diversify their reading, can add to their TBR in countless ways.
Sylvia Hamilton’s And I Alone Escaped to Tell You (2014) is the kind of work that seems to have burst forth as a single act of creation, rather than seeming to be a collection of poems. Divided into three parts, with epigraphs from the Bible and from Pablo Neruda, there is a whisper of classical allusion, but her poems emphasize accessibility. Indeed, there is an overarching narrative, rooted in 18th-century documents, including excerpts from reward postings for enslaved men and women who have fled their captivity (Freedom Runners) and wealthy men’s papers designating the distribution of their “property”, including people, who are passed to the next generations, like silverware and china. Some of the poems tell self-contained stories, like “Thursday of Gull Island”: “Some say she fly with the gulls. Some say that whale wait for her just off shore.” Others, like “By Some Other Name” present fragments of sensation: “bloody fingers claw moss breath”.
The second part opens with “Excavation”, as though commenting on the act which has driven the earlier work, simultaneously reminding readers that there is still much to be unearthed:
I am not the navigator on this journey.
I am more than a passenger, but not the captain.
Longing for that which is not,
for what could have been,
for that imagined place.
Readers of this cycle move from 1964 to 1981 and then, in the next poem, move with a class of children who are visiting a museum and viewing Hitler’s skull.
The third section slides into the present-day, spiralling around matters of predation and exploitation which proliferate in our daily lives. From lawn ornaments to public transit, the legacy of oppression still blooms: “In a hundred years what will the archeologist decide went on here?” (Also, on a more superficial note, Gaspereau Press’s publications are produced on thick, creamy paper, making their pages a particular wonder to hold and turn. The cover of this one is embossed with names from an archival source, the names of Africans who were brought to Nova Scotia against their will, torn from their homelands. You can run your fingertips across these words and wonder at the fact that many of them would never have been allowed to touch a book.)
Maxine Tynes is a descendant of Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia and has lived her life in Dartmouth. She’s been writing poetry since she was a student at Dalhousie University there, and Woman Talking Woman (1990) is her second collection. (I wrote about her first collection here.)
“I stand hopeful and afraid, and
move over
and over and over your threshold /
as the book begins
as you read me now”: she writes.
Once more, Tynes peers into women’s working lives, with “Cashiers at the Supermarket”:
“Pass me my coins and cabbages and a smile in your eyes; or, the flicker of pain up from
eight hour legs
as the register clicks and beeps
and rings up our connection
at the check-out.”
She writes about Africville, the northern Halifax community razed between 1964 and 1969:
“That disenfranchisement and racism is the same everywhere. That Soweto is Chicago is Toronto
is Detroit is Montreal is New York is Halifax and Dartmouth is Africville.”
She also writes about Margaret Atwood poems, Joni Mitchell lyrics and melodies, and the possibility that she has Micmac ancestors.
One of the poems in Maxine Tynes’ collection was inspired by Portia White, “The Call to Tea”; Tynes writes about “this daughter of old Halifax / this feted lady of the world stage”. Readers can discover more of the story in George Elliott Clarke’s Portia White: A Portrait in Words (2019).
With artwork by Lara Martina, Clarke tells the story of a Truro schoolgirl, who sang in the choir of her father’s church, became an international opera sensation. She also happens to be the author’s great-aunt (whose name might be familiar because I absolutely loved his 1991 novel in verse, Whylah Falls) and he refers curious readers to Lian Goodall’s 2004 biography, Singing Towards the Future. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine that anyone other than family has such an exquisite selection of photographs to admire.
Clarke was also, coincidentally, the winner of Nova Scota’s inaugural Portia White Prize for Artistic Excellence in 1998, which seems both fitting and strange. (I mean, she didn’t get to vote obviously, but it does seem he’d be a shoe-in for any jury, no?)
Clarke’s homage is written in verse, which is likely more satisfying heard in his voice (he’s such an exuberant reader); even though I thought I’d prefer the verses that rhyme, I preferred the blank verse. The work seems to be as much about creating a mood as it is about creating awareness—there’s a grandeur and old-fashioned elegance to the vocabulary and structure.
If you are curious where my first two posts about Atlantic Canadian storytellers took me, you can check here and here.
“Soon.” “One of these days.” “Eventually.” I’ve been saying that about wanting to take a closer and more deliberate look at writers and poets from the East Coast for a long time. To find new works to shelve alongside my Michael Crummey and Wayne Johnston, Donna Morrissey and Carol Bruneau. It turns out that there are options. “Now.” “Today.” “Why not?”
Oh my that first Gaspereau Press book sounds gorgeous! I love a creamy paper stock, which may sound weird because I don’t keep any of my books, but I think it signals to the reader that words should be treasured, which is why they are printed on such beautiful paper by certain publishers. Mass paperbacks have their place for sure, but I love a beautiful book too. And the embossing on the cover! Wow.
Wait, wait, waiiiiiiiit. You don’t keep ANY of your books? What is this madness you speak of?
How does your house know what you’re about, if you don’t have books lining those walls? 😮
haha well I always have lots of books because I receive, probably on average around 150 books per year for review! I need to give away the ones I’ve read to make room for the new ones…
I have been writing about place, off and on, all day. The post is just now sitting on a wire cakestand under a tea towel for a short time while I wait for it to cool off. I love place. I love the connection you feel with writing about ‘your’ place. Still, I struggle to read the same books (But, Attwood and Donna Milner in the past few weeks). I want you and Naomi to tell me what it’s like over there on the far side of the world, in Toronto and on the Atlantic coast – I think of black rocks, and ice and a freezing sea, but is that right? And how does Toronto feel about Montreal? And then Vancouver – is it a rival or irrelevant? And all those farmers out on the prairies, you never mention them. So many questions. Only Ice Truckers gives me answers, and I haven’t watched that for years.
I appreciate the simmering process, when it comes to a piece of writing but, having said that, I would prefer to imagine that there’s a cake on that wire stand under the tea towel. And, today, it feels like a chocolate one would be especially nice. Place is big for me, too, and when I think of Australian writers who have managed to carry me there, I think of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. More than a decade ago, when I was working in a market, one of the shop’s regulars was an Australian man living in that city for one year while his wife fulfilled a contract in the medical community, and we swapped Australian and Canadian favourites throughout that year but agreed that it was hard to summarize countries that contain such dramatic contrasts in temperatures and landscapes and, yet, one has to start somewhere. I’ve got some plans to reorganize BIP next year, and maybe some of the regional posts will be easier to explore after that, but I specifically take your challenge about situating farmers at the heart of things. After all, if we aren’t eating, we’re not reading! I’m going to round up some books on that topic for sure! Thanks, Bill.
You have managed to name my least favourite and most favourite (almost – I prefer The Swan Book) books in one comment, though I haven’t really thought about The Secret River in terms of its descriptions of the Hawkesbury River. I am going to have to think about which Australian book best nails ‘place’. Off the top of my head – Miles Franklin, All That Swagger.
Hah–I liked The Swan Book, too, but I read Carpentaria aloud and I think I rushed through the newer book (it had a duedate) so didn’t properly appreciate it. It’s been ages since I read that Grenville but other than the massacre scene (and I was impressed by that because I hadn’t read any books by white settlers that openly confronted the brutality of colonization in that way) it’s only the sense of place that I remember. What didn’t work for you–it’s not like the Jane Harper thing, an inauthenticity, is it? That’s not a Franklin I’ve read, but I see there is a single circulating copy in the library, so I’ve added it to my TBR.
The Secret River caused a stir because the people and attitudes are so C21st (which has made it popular as a school text). I criticise it so often that early next year I must re-read it and then review the debate which centres on criticism by the (late) revered historian Inga Clendinnen.
I’ll be interested to read your reflections when/if you do revisit it with her criticisms in mind. I’m particularly interested in that you and I have chatted before about how frequently people use the “but it was the times” excuse, when there have always been people advocating for fairness and justice, abolition of slavery and that kind of social change, in every century.