Quirky characters take to the road

South of Elfrida
By Holley Rubinsky
Brindle & Glass, 231 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

The characters in Holley Rubinsky’s fourth book (and second collection of short stories) are simultaneously ordinary and quirky, predatory and loving. If you’ve ever been squished between motor homes in a roadside campground heading south, you’ve maybe shared a drink with them and surprised yourself with how much you’ve revealed about your life, while doves and grackles cavort nearby and small pets slink between your legs. In these stories, misfits and the wounded, often in the guise of aging independent single women unshackled from a lifetime’s worth of loss, haul their homes on trailer hitches and live temporarily in RV parks and rented apartments, usually in Arizona.

In the collection’s most touching story,“ Desert Dreams,” Nina, grieving her husband’s death and facing her mother’s imminent passing, takes to the road with a camper trailer. “The burden of being followed everywhere by her own home is an inescapable preoccupation too; for long moments she hurts less about Frank.”

Though her concerns may rest with matters of the heart, Rubinsky’s stories are unsentimental, edged with farce and sprinkled with capricious detail: an electric palm tree and a Chihuahua with his own sequined director’s chair. In “The Compact,” Sally, idling in a RV park for six months of the year, cherishes the tiny and not so tiny secrets she keeps from her boorish flag-waving, bigoted husband: her second glass of wine, the spit in the meatloaf, the compact in which she hides the ashes from the black baby she aborted in the early days of their marriage. Even Rubinsky’s darker humour does not so much horrify as hearten; I am left believing in the redemptive power of life’s odd miscalculated moments.

An undercurrent of tension in these stories suggests that unmoored from the safety of the familiar we are vulnerable to the predator, not just in the natures of others but also in our own. This is particularly evident in the first three stories, the strongest in the collection. In a chilling irony, a child molester encloses baby turtles for their safety, a woman walks willingly into a pen of frenzied emus and in the title story the “hawk man . . .bags the birds, each one a bride. She recognizes the intensity in him, the coldness.”

In a literary world where clever verbiage and narrative sleight-of-hand is too often celebrated over substance, Rubinsky’s voice is wise and straight-up. In uncomplicated prose with a depth that knows in the end we are all travellers, she explores the impermanence of things: the ethereal quality of desert light, the elusive nature of time and reality. Barb, who has run into trouble at the border thinks, “people camping a night here, a week there, don’t care about accuracy or truth.” In “Desert Dreams” a dying Miriam comforts herself and her peers by pretending she has seen “the special spark at the end, a flash of green as the sun disappears over the horizon.”

 

Judy LeBlanc writes fiction and has recently completed her MFA at the University of Victoria.

Tosca restores faith for disillusioned opera fan

Tosca
Pacific Opera Victoria
The Royal Theatre
April 4, 6, 10 & 12 at 8 pm
Sunday Matinee April 14 at 2:30 pm

Reviewed by Andrea Routley

What comes to mind when you hear the word, “opera”? Viking horns and yellow braids? How about “Italian opera”? Sopranos in velvety robes, collapsing under the weight of their own agony? Lust, murder, star-crossed sort of thing?

Then you’re probably thinking of Tosca, one of Puccini’s most famous operas, which first premiered in Rome in 1900. It has often been dismissed by critics, but the singers, director, production designer, instrumentalists, and the many others involved in Pacific Opera’s production, as well as the audience which packed house at the Royal Theatre on Saturday, feel differently.

What is really praise-worthy about this production are the understated aesthetics and direction which actually made all this slap-stick emotional climaxing seem, well, almost genuine.

Production designer Christina Poddubiuk presents a set of rustic, bare wood scaffolding which plays the role of church, police chief office, prison cell and battlements. I appreciated this for the way it evoked the cages the characters find themselves in, but also provided a modern, muted aesthetic. This, combined with relatively simple costuming–solid colour dresses for Floria Tosca, unadorned uniforms for Scarpia’s henchman–compensated for all the flashy melodrama.

The highlight for me was tenor Luc Robert, who played the role of Tosca’s lover, Cavaradossi. His voice is silky–almost boyish, but offered a nuanced, raspy quality now and then which gave depth to the character. Opera is not praised for the acting, something which typically takes a back seat to the musicianship (not to mention the years of practice in Italian diction and storming around stages without tripping over long heavy dresses). Not surprisingly, this was also the weakest element in this production, but Robert really impressed me. His movements were natural and organic–there was no cheesy arm-acting or “ta-da!” physicality from Robert. It looked as though he were really listening to what the other characters were saying, and responding authentically to that in a complex and elegant way. His response to Tosca’s coquettish insecurity in Act One, for example, was at once tender, patronising, and subservient.

This production also offered a colourful variety of voices. If you’re an opera newbie, you may think one tenor sounds just like another, but pay special attention to Scarpia’s henchman, Spoletta, played by Michel Corbeil. His voice has a watery, burbling quality to it that is totally exciting.

Finally, thank you to the director, Amiel Gladstone: The last time I saw a production of Tosca, I almost left after the second act. I stayed for the third. Stuff happened, then Tosca spun around and leaped off a fake building, in front of a fake pastoral scene. “Oh, for chrissakes,” I said, peeved.

But you, my dearest Gladstone, have waved your wand to give us a perfect death.

Curtain.

“Nice.”

My faith in opera: restored.

 

Remarkable exhibit a ferry ride away

Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Van Dyck: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London
Seattle Art Museum until May 19, 2013
$20 adult, $17 senior, $12 student and teen; free for 12 and under

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Fabulously rich people can afford fabulous art collections, and the First Earl of Iveagh, Edward Cecil Guinness (1847-1927) (yes, that Guinness) apparently had a budget to match his exquisite taste in paintings. The current special exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) features 48 works from the collection usually on view at Kenwood House in London. Renovations at Kenwood House have created the opportunity for the collection to be exhibited at various US museums. Art lovers going to Seattle in the near future should pay a visit to SAM to see these remarkable paintings.

Before you go, you can download an app to your phone and then listen to experts discuss various works or you can use the free audio guides at the museum. Listening while observing is a good time-saver: you don’t need to read the descriptions as you feast on the images.

The key painting, which is also featured on the PR material, is Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Artist ca. 1665. Rembrandt painted numerous self-portraits, and this one done about four years before his death in 1669 shows him holding the tools of his trade. Rembrandt’s mastery of light and shadow is evident, and in the plain background are two circles that have puzzled critics for ages. One theory is that Rembrandt was simply showing his ability to draw circles. I listened to the docent’s talk about this painting (free talks are scheduled at various times), and she commented that Rembrandt kept a stash of self-portraits in his studio, ready for sale to visitors. And in that way the collector got “two for one”: a Rembrandt painting and a portrait of the artist.

My favourite portrait in the exhibit is Frans Hals’s 1633 Portrait of Pieter van den Broecke (1585-1640). Hals’s jaunty depiction of the merchant breathes life into a man who has been dead for centuries. And that perhaps is why I love portraits: a skilled portrait painter, such as Hals and Rembrandt, shows the humanity of his or her subject. The clothing could change, and the person could be walking down the street today.

The Kenwood House collection includes more than portraits, but they are the ones that captured me the most. But other paintings are also arresting. The first that comes to mind is Albert Cuyp’s View of Dordrecht (ca. 1655), a seascape with splendid and precise detail. You can even see the time on the clock in the background, and the flat Dutch city seems to cower behind a meticulously detailed sailing ship. I fell in love with Cuyp’s landscapes many years ago as he often includes cows in them.

Many of these 17th and 18th century paintings have never been shown outside of Britain before, so having them just a ferry ride away is a treat. Plan for a couple of hours, and your ticket will also get you into the European Masters: The Treasures of Seattle exhibit and the rest of SAM.

 

Tunnels, Treehouses and Trainsmoke!

Coastal Spectator reviewer Noah Cebuliak, himself a musician living in Montreal, recently interviewed travelling-man Jeff Andrew about his new music and his forth-coming CD.  Andrew grew up in Ontario, has a degree from the University of Victoria, and has criss-crossed Canada many times in his near-indestructible 1988 Toyota 4Runner. He calls the vehicle CCRider, and says he has logged 430,000 kilometres in the vehicle.

Jeff, tell me about your inspiration to record in tunnels and other underground spaces. Why are you drawn there and not to other locations, like churches or actual studios? Have you recorded anything in other semi-obscure places, like grain silos or caves or the like?

I’ve always been drawn to the underground. Secret places in general, like tunnels, crawlspaces, secret passages in old houses, sub-basements . . . probably from growing up on mysteries and horror stories. Same reason I love old buildings–they’re full of ghosts. I get a lot of inspiration thinking about the lives that have been lived there, what might have happened in those spaces.

They also tend to have really interesting acoustics. One of my favourite records is by a BC fiddler named Oliver Schroer (who passed away about 5 years ago). He did an album called Camino where he walked the El Camino De Santiago trail in Spain and recorded himself playing in all the old cathedrals. The sound of that album breaks my heart. I listen to it almost every day.

I’ve never done any grain silos or caves but maybe one day! Studios tend to be expensive, and I don’t like the idea of recording in a hermetically sealed chamber, cut off from the outside world. One of the things I love about old folk and blues records that were recorded in people’s houses, hotel rooms, front porches is that you can hear things like old cars in the background, dogs barking, trains rolling by in the distance . . .  they are like a time machine.

What are the songs you’re going to record about? What inspires you to write? Are the songs linked to the subterranean theme at all?

Let’s see, there are a couple of travel songs, a set of fiddle tunes written to sound like a freight train taking off, a murder ballad set in the Carnival era, a lighthearted novelty song about police brutality . . . also an apocalyptic love song and a true story song about a girl named Nyki Kish, who’s serving a life sentence in Ontario for a murder she didn’t commit. I can’t see how she did it, at least, and I’ve read through the judge’s verdict from the trial and dozens of newspaper articles about it. Seems like another case of wrong place, wrong time and the cops desperate to pin it on somebody, so they picked the easiest target. Lots more about her at www.freenyki.org.

There’s also a song called “The Graveyard Downtown,” loosely based on Victoria’s secret history. I learned there used to be a graveyard at Douglas and Johnson, back when that was the edge of the city . . . It’s about what used to be there before the modern city was built. And all the history the city (and Canada as a whole) doesn’t like to talk about. The Chinese head tax, the internment camps, residential schools, the whole reservation system, plus all the Asian people who died building the railroads and the tremendous labour battles that were fought in the 1910s and 20s. Our country was built on a lot of racism, abuse and exploitation. We pay lip service to some of it, but most of the physical legacy is being torn down and replaced with condos. All the old buildings, bridges, alleyways, shipyards, train yards, even the grain elevators–the places where the people who built Canada lived, worked and died–are disappearing. Part of that is an attempt to erase the past, the living history you can see and touch. Reduce it to footnotes in a textbook and it stops being real.

You say in your Indiegogo campaign video that you’ve got a whole collection of obscure string instruments. What draws you toward these fringe instruments?

The new album called “Tunnels,” which you can pre-order and donate to, is going to have to some unusual string instruments on it. I don’t have as big a collection as I’d like, but I do have a baritone violin, a 5-string violin and a Stroh violin. The 5-string has an extra low string on the bottom and the baritone violin has heavy strings on it so I can tune it an octave lower than normal. It’s basically down in cello range. The Stroh violin (which you can see in my profile shot on the Indiegogo page) has a resonator and a big phonograph horn instead of a body. I’ve also got a steel-bodied resonator guitar on a couple of tracks.

I love these early attempts at amplifying strings. They date back to the turn of the 20th century when recordings were done into a giant cone with a needle at the end of it scratching the sound into a wax cylinder. You had to be really loud and forceful to get your playing in through that cone – also to cut through the sound of a horn section on stage. Simple answer: add a horn to the violin!

Are you going to record with a band, live, or will you be multi-tracking and building a bigger sound?

The Stroh violin is somewhere between a fiddle and a trumpet. Plus I can use the baritone violin to build my own string section. So yes, multi-tracking. We actually did most of the recording already in Vancouver–me on guitar, fiddle and vocals, plus Ryan Boeur from Fish & Bird on lead guitar and Kenan Sungur from High Society (who also played drums on my last album), laying down percussion and upright bass. He’s a one-man rhythm section! And Ryan is one of the best accompanists out there right now. And we had Corwin Fox to record it, who’s done two albums for me already and is a brilliant engineer and producer. We’ve all been playing together for a long time, so it went down pretty easy. The tunnel stuff I’m going to do on my own with a handheld recorder later this week.

How is the campaign going? Are you planning a big release and tour for the album after its completed? What are your career expectations for this record?

I told someone recently I want my career to be like that little shack at the edge of town, where the river bends and the tracks have broken down . . . it’s out there waiting for me, in disrepair right now but one day I’ll be able to live in it.

The campaign’s doing well so far, really encouraging. The better it does, the more I’ll be have to pay everyone involved and put into the packaging and promoting of it. So please keep the shares and contributions coming! It means a lot to an independent artist, to get this kind of support.

I’m planning a zine to go with it, a hand-drawn songbook (by Victoria’ s Fraea the Banshee) of all the chords and lyrics. I’m aiming to release it at the end of summer with a couple of big shows in Victoria and Vancouver, followed by a cross-Canada tour (in sections this time, I’m through with doing the whole thing at once. The country’s too damn big!)

After that, we’ll see. I took the last year off from touring and promotion, so I could write and get better at fiddle. I spent this winter in Halifax learning east coast fiddle tunes and playing with an orchestra, trying to get my head around classical music, which I fell totally in love with over  the past couple  of years. I needed a break from the music business, to let the tanks fill up again. Now they’re full, and I’m ready to jump back in the game. I have most of another album written and ready to go; that’ll be a much bigger project with electric guitars and some kind of string section. And plans for a musical after that — or it might turn out to be a novel with an album to go with it.

In other words, yeah. I’m taking this as far as it can go. Stay tuned!

 

Learn more about Tunnels, Treehouses & Trainsmoke here:

 

Marina MArina captivates audience

Marina MArina
Victoria House Concert B
April 4, 2013

Reviewed by Blake Jacob

An enthusiastic group welcomed West Coast folk artist Marina MArina to Victoria House Concert b on April 4, 2013. Marina’s unique warmth and striking music made this evening unforgettable. Her captivating opening act, folk duo The Ghostbirds, was a perfect match for her with their ethereal vocal arrangements and powerful lyrics.

Marina is a true storyteller, drawing in her listener with an easy smile and natural, comedic charm. Her melodies are comforting and unique. She introduces one song with, “This is my invitation song to all,” connecting the audience to her and to one another. A few people in the crowd reminisce between songs about attending one of Marina’s shows and spending a magical night afterwards singing along to her album in a pedi-cab under the stars.

One can’t resist singing along with Marina. Her voice is gorgeously smoky and full of feeling. As she sings, “I’ll be waiting when the truth gets in,” one envisions that she always finds the sweet in the bittersweet.  Even her heartbreak songs seem lighthearted and hopeful. She remembers, “I reminisced because I miss the one hot moment when we kissed,” and then sharply, cynically, “but love is a con,” winking at the laughing and nodding audience members.

Marina’s music is reminiscent of, but not derivative of, Ani DiFranco. Her cover of DiFranco’s “You Had Time” was such a beautiful reinvention that hearing this song may forever evoke a memory of this night. A listener feels uplifted, centered, as if experiencing “a few green trees to clear your mind,” as one of her songs offers.  When maracas and tambourines were passed through the audience, it felt as if these listeners had become a family supplementing her rhythm. This group of approximately thirty strangers-turned-friends begged her back for two encores. Marina sings, “in this place, we’re all the same,” and that feeling is undeniable.

 

Blake Jacob is a Vancouver Island poet whose essential nutrients are optimism, wordsmithery, and captivating melody.

Poet’s team video undermines bullying

Shane Koyczan and collaborators
To This Day – TED Talk

Reviewed by DJ Fraser

Vancouver resident Shane Koyczan is already a fully fledged Canadian poetry star, and that is no easy stardom to come by. Koyczan appeared at TED this past February, where he performed the now-viral multimedia performance of “To This Day,” with violin accompaniment by Hannah Epperson and animated segments executed with the help of dozens of animators.

The animators who collaborated with Koyczan for this performance are not one-time colleagues–all are collaborators for the To This Day project, a continued effort to prevent childhood and adolescent bullying. This outreach project aims to connect and inspire those willing to stand up to bullying and to “find the beauty” in the world.

At any live TED talk, there are two screens onto which animations, graphs, charts or live feed footage are projected. Koyczan’s performance was augmented with an introduction that is not in the original video for the To This Day project, which exists as a animated video work. Throughout the performance, the rhythm of Koyczan’s words guides the visuals painstakingly through images that break apart, split at the seams and shatter to reveal new scenes of mixed media, from cut-out paper animation to pencil drawings. Breaks in the imagery shift back to the performers and the audience at TEDquarters, their rapt attention turned to Koyczan on stage.

If you view the TED talk from home, the segmented animation often occupies the entire visual space, with Koyczan’s sweet, impossibly fluid then abrupt, hopeful narratives as a sound track.  The conscious synthesis of Koyczan’s poetry and the graphic styles of literally dozens of animators remind the viewer of the absence of a monolithic style or predominant medium accompaniment to Koyczan’s poetry.

The combination of this multi-perspectival poem and multimedia presentation (at the live performance as well as in a home viewing) crosses media boundaries:  narrative, visual representation, graphic animation and music are cast together. Without any doubt, my favourite aspect of this TED video/performance was Koyczan and collaborators’ clever balance of media with poetry, and how this aspect of the work conveys a multitude of experiences, rather than Koyczan’s singular view. Calling attention to the universality of the bullied child in all of us, Koyczan and his team turn a singular work into a global movement.  Different voices speak out, turning words into shields, drawings into livelihood, casting collective hopes with each other. The presentation and intermedia experience offered by Koyczan’s performance reinforces the idea that collective strength, through art and self-expression, enables survival and success. On a bad day, this performance could bring tears of happiness to my eye in spite of the world. On a good day, it could bring tears because of it.

Subscribe to #ToThisDay for project updates.

DJ Fraser is an MA History in Art student at UVic and the online gallery curator for Plenitude Magazine.

 

Painters inspire new perceptions

On Friday, March 15th, Deluge Contemporary Art (located at 636 Yates Street) hosted the opening of Drama of Perception, an exhibit of the work of three contemporary painters: Stephanie Aitken, Katie Lyle, and Shelley Penfold, all former students of the University of Victoria Visual Arts Graduate Program. Deluge, located in the upper story of Victoria’s original fire hall, sponsors the Antimatter Film Festival and aims to represent “a vanguard of visual and media arts in Victoria.” The curator for the exhibit is Sandra Meigs, a visual arts professor at the University of Victoria; Julian Gunn interviewed her about the artists and the show. Drama of Perception runs until April 15, 2013.

Sandra, how did the exhibition come about? How did you come to hang the work of these three painters together, and what kind of context do they create for each other?

I’ve been teaching painting at UVic for twenty years. I’ve known Deborah De Boer, the gallery director at Deluge, over the course of that time and I’ve always admired the way she supports artists in Victoria. Her gallery space is lovely and a really good focused space for viewing art.

About a year ago Deborah asked me if I’d curate a show of painters. She said she’d be interested to see what paintings I put together because I “have an interesting mind.” All three of these painters work in a way that is free of referential structures and strategic methods of construction. By that I mean that they form their images from something other than direct referencing of things in the world. Stephanie paints from her head, using her own made-up drawings to paint from. And Shelley leaves her canvases outside and lets nature take its own course on them before bringing them into the studio and then reads herself into them. Oh sure, Katie Lyle paints women, and may have stacks of magazine images and photos of women in her studio, but she rarely paints directly from them. It is more like she has digested the world, and then transferred it into herself.

Stephanie, Katie and Shelley were all in our Grad Program at different times. They are living in Vancouver and that also interests me. The art scene in Vancouver is not overwhelmingly supportive of painting, but I know there are a lot of great painters living there, so I thought this might be a way to get to know some of what’s happening there in painting. And that certainly worked, as I went twice to visit the artists’ studios. One of the artists is going to arrange for me to do more studio visits with other painters over there soon.

You note that when you look at these paintings, you “have total conviction that the forms . . . exist in the world.” I found that particularly true of Stephanie Aitken’s paintings, which often seemed haunted by real-world perspectives–partially occluded views–flattened into a plane, which makes me think immediately of photography. Although the forms themselves have a genuine immediacy and are not mimetic, can you speak to the subterranean role of mediated viewpoint in Aitken’s paintings?

That’s an interesting idea. Yes, they do seem occluded, one could say looked at through one eye because they lack spatial depth, also altered, as though looking through a fish-eye lens. I think of them as totemic heads that have no back or sides but that are nonetheless authoritative. Their flatness is their virtue and strength and everything good about them. Like a veil that has all the power of the kingdom behind it. I don’t see them as mediated viewpoints. On the contrary, I think they are completely unmediated. That is, they exist without the intervention of any other Thing.

On a similar note, your discussion of Katie Lyle’s portraits was fascinating. At a cursory glance, her paintings might appear to be rather inexpertly rendered portraiture. However, in your monograph you describe Lyle’s long process of “working in” these images, and closer examination shows evidence of careful relationships among the small geometric forms, the lines and arcs, that compose the features of these faces. So Lyle’s paintings are, in a sense, performative works–she is performing a certain kind of painting and also undermining our assumptions about it. How might you advise a viewer to approach this performative element in Lyle’s work?

I guess. Sure, you could say they are performative. Her work is a recording of its own formation. I imagine a beautiful portrait, an at-once captured likeness in paint, and a genuinely radiant young woman showing all her heart and soul, free of touch ups and fakery, at her most absolute real. Then I imagine Katie having made that portrait and repainting it over and over, trying to capture some fleeting essence of the young woman. I imagine that as Katie paints, Katie is also thinking about painting and about all we have seen of painting. I imagine Katie wants to kick painting, to rock it, to destroy and challenge all of our assumptions about beauty in art so as to get closer to the woman’s essence. So, the paintings are a mash-up of radiant young woman meets painting, full on. The geometric forms are new. I think those are very new paintings. I think that is Katie’s way of pushing the painting back even more into a kind of formal depravity that begs for its own beauty.

Actually, all of these questions may be about process and its relation to final form. It seems that there are two distinct stages to Shelley Penfold’s process of creating her paintings. First, there is the phase of putting the canvas itself into situations where it will become weathered and altered–an object with a certain independence. Second, there is the phase where her own gestures become important as she adds marks. Both stages contain random and chosen elements, but can you speak about the relationship of the two? Or if we want to shed the temporal aspect, the relationship of the marks on the surface to the features of the surface itself?

Yeah. I don’t actually think much about those paintings is random. I think Shelley has a lot of control over where she puts them outside, what the weather is going to do to them, what colours she put on them first or adds later. That is the main attraction of the work to me, which is that I can’t figure out what is random and what is chosen, so I choose to think it’s all chosen. Who knows why a sailboat got into that scene in “Fountain of Youth”. Or, why “Blue Lightening” looks like it has a turkey drumstick in it. Or why there’s no man in Mr. Mister. How lovely! That’s how the imagination works. No explanation needed. Also what I find fascinating about them is the play between the marks and the surface. Which is which? A pour of brown enamel is equally a surface and a mark. A scratching of distressed dye on fabric is equally a surface and a mark. Sometimes there is the odd gestural line as in “Blue Lightening” which is very much a mark, but there aren’t many of them. Just ones you could count on one hand. And that makes these grouping of paintings seem most basic or base to me, of essence to humanity.

“As I persist in doubt and knowingness, I am closest to my living perceptual experiences of the world.” That’s your comment about viewing these works, and it comes close to a Buddhist statement about using meditation to achieve an immediate relationship to the world. Is this a goal of artistic production for you? A goal for you, as a viewer of art?

Absolutely! For me, working in the studio is a state of mind that is focused on the moment. Making art is having freedom from thought and an engagement with the world through each and every breath of movement in space between the canvas, the palette, the brush, and the hand, the being. To get in that zone is to set the thinnest possible membrane of separation between the world and me. We become one, you see. Think about the studio as a giant meditating mind. The Artist is in there kicking stuff around and trying to get rid of chatter to make the one form that essential in that moment.

Looking at art can be meditative if the art doesn’t try to complete too much for me. If it is me who is completing it, then it works. That allows me the engagement of doubt and knowing that makes me aware of myself completing it and of not completing it.  A constant, endless meditation.

Long-silent poet’s voice surprises

Tilt
By E. Blagrave,
Cormorant Books, 61 pages, $18

Reviewed by Isa Milman

There is a wonderful, literal, backstory to this first book of poetry by E. Blagrave, who is herself somewhat of a mystery. Thirteen of these poems were first published in one issue of The Fiddlehead in 1973, when the author was a young woman. Soon after, she disappeared from print for more than thirty years. She’s now returned, having gone full circle, with this collection.

My usual approach to poetry is visual, but this collection came in through my ears. What a happy surprise. I heard E.’s young voice, and her mature voice, but couldn’t always distinguish which voice was speaking. Another happy surprise. Her opening poem rang in like a folk song, with lyrics delicate yet sharp and moody, and set the stage for what was to come. Reading her book, I conjured Jethro Tull, Judy Collins, and Sting in his early days, singing about the golden sun and fields of barley. He was fairer than corn growing/ and brighter by far than the dawn. I found myself moving from past to present, not sure which tense to dwell in.

As in the heady heart-break of the best folk songs, love is finely rendered in these poems, but slippery, not easy to hold. E. points to a laburnum’s flowery cascade and tells us:

our love is left to time,
to braid the yellow clusters up;
to give to me what isn’t mine.

E. extends her hand and invites us to saddle up for a ride, to join her in a meadow, by a lake, or to lie down with her in her great-grandfather’s orchard, and observe the rows of apple trees: We take comfort in such precision. It gives us an inkling of our situation.

And such is our situation. Joy is the natural world, but also uneasiness in its frightening fragility. The man-made world is less secure, and often a source of discomfort. In “You are So Alone” . . . the buildings are chained/and have in them lonely places. Better to lie in the orchard.

I appreciate her bijou poems, so spare, so evocative:

Here lie the agencies
.         of my heart:
The still lake
.         and small fish
.        simmering therein,
the sun in my fist,
the drowned world
and all that spins.

Toward the close of her collection, E. prepares us for winter with the beauty of

November:

The little tree
was butter-yellow,
was fall.
Fall still graced my window.
After a while the leaves
turned black at the edges
like a blighted rose,
and frost was on the roofs
in the morning.
Then the leaves fell
and winter closed the door.

The record has stopped spinning on the turntable. I pick up E.’s volume and listen again. It’s even better the second time around.

Isa Milman is a poet and visual artist who has called Victoria home for the last sixteen years. Her first two poetry collections have each won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her new collection, Something Small to Carry Home, was recently released.

 

 

Author takes risks with nonfiction

Rosina: The Midwife
By Jessica Kluthe
Brindle and Glass, 216 pages, $19.95
E-book, $14.95

Reviewed by Lynne Bowen

Rosina, the midwife is a true account of the life of an Italian woman from the region of Calabria. Rosinaʼs young and modern great, great granddaughter, Jessica Kluthe, is the author.
 Kluthe, who has an MFA in Writing from the University of Victoria, lives in Edmonton. This is her first book.

In writing the book, Kluthe pushes against the definition of nonfiction. In parts of the story where she could not know what Rosina was thinking or doing, Kluthe enhances the narrative with invention. But she does it by signaling to the reader that what follows is what she has imagined.

When Rosina the midwife walks through the Calabrian night to deliver a baby, we are with her because Kluthe has used her knowledge of the woman and the terrain to imagine what it must have been like:

She knows the ground well, even in the dark. She slows down around the spots where rotting roots have left holes and takes wider strides over a nettle patch; her legs are bare beneath her gown.

Kluthe enhances the narrative with the knowledge that years of doing research and listening to family stories has given her about her ancestor whose lonely but useful life is now mostly unknowable.

There is no song to help me feel her, no voice to remind me of hers. There is no scent, no texture. No time of day.

In language that is spare and breathtakingly beautiful, Kluthe has written a book which carves new paths for literary nonfiction to follow.

I confess that I brought a bias to the reading of the book: I had taught creative nonfiction writing for several years and believed that the audience for nonfiction wants to know that all the events in the book really happened. But Klutheʼs book meets with my approval, which says more about the chances she takes and the evolution of nonfiction writing, than about the validity of my bias.

I also came to this book having spent eleven years researching and writing about Italy and the people who were forced to leave it. From the perspective of a non-Italian at least, I knew the topic of Italian emigration well. Now, having read Rosina, the midwife, I know more about the few who were left behind and I understand more about the emigrants and their descendants.

Kluthe is artful in the way she handles time and sequence as she navigates between her own and her ancestorʼs stories. She bravely reveals her own tragedies in moving detail and is equally brave in her insistence that her relatives help her in her efforts to fill in the blanks in the familyʼs past. The fact that she travelled to Calabria with her grandfather and her uncle — two additional generations of her family, one able to speak Italian, the other Calabrese — makes a true but inadvertent statement about the changes emigration causes in families.

The reader is in Calabria with Rosina at a time when wheat still grows in the fields and vines still bear fruit, but wretched poverty is driving the people away. And the reader is in Calabria with Kluthe a century later when the soil will not hold water and Rosinaʼs people have died or have left Italy for another part of the world.

Lynne Bowen is a Nanaimo writer; her latest book is Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia.