Hiromi Goto (author) and Ann Xu (illustrator), Shadow Life (New York: First Second Books, 2021). Hardbound, 368 pp., $33.99.
Sharon Kirsch, The Smallest Objective (Vancouver: New Star, 2020). Paperbound, 272 pp., $22.
Sharon McCartney, Villa Negativa: A Memoir in Verse (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2021). Paperbound, 72 pp., $19.95.
Jane Munro, Glass Float (London: Brick, 2020). Paperbound, 86 pp., $20.00.
Susan Olding, Big Reader (Calgary: Freehand, 2021). Paperbound, 204 pp., $22.95.
Dominique Béchard, One Dog Town (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2019). Paperbound, 78 pp., $19.95.
Enduring graphic novels—like Maus or Persepolis or Sabrina—give
readers a rich and textured story, and Hiromi Goto’s and Ann Xu’s
Shadow Life is in that class of book that provides profound delights.
The novel is a Vollendungsroman, a term coined by Constance Rooke
to describe a story of winding up in old age that involves an affirmation
of life, in this case while facing death. Kumiko is a seventy‐sixyear‐
old Japanese Canadian woman who breaks free of her
assisted‐living home and rents an apartment in funky East Van. She
struggles with her own body, with the anxieties and demands of her
adult daughters, with solitude, and with death itself, which shows up
as a dark shadow and has an epic encounter with Kumiko’s secondhand
vacuum cleaner. What Kumiko makes us wonder, perhaps indirectly,
is why, given the age of the baby‐boom population in North
America, there are so few stories being told with heroes who are
lumpy, creaky, sexual, full of wisdom in many ways, and also stubborn,
and sometimes reckless. Kumiko wants to confront death on her
own terms and her initial escape is a metaphor for a way of understanding
that death is coming and that fear is not our only option
when it shows up. As the story progresses, it is increasingly magical
and Xu’s illustrations become especially important in terms of representing
what may be a state of mind, or may be part of the fabulous
life of Kumiko whose end is in sight.
In things there is meaning, but the sense of importance is often very
personal, and when someone leaves the world, it is up to someone
else to go through their stuff and, without the context the owner gave
it, decide what is valuable. Thus, the play here on objects and objectivity;
the trigger for this memoir is the decline and death of the
writer’s mother and while processing the objects left behind, Sharon
Kirsch uses an investigative objectivity that allows her to find the story
in those things. Kirsch is very good at creating narrative tension and
at bringing characters to life, so she includes the reader in her quest,
which eventually involves ground‐penetrating radar to locate, before the final sale of the family home, the “treasure” her father may have hidden under the bedroom floor, and we discover along with her the truth behind the rumours surrounding great uncle Jockey Fleming and his questionable connections. Whether the thing that starts the story going is a commissioned house or a collection of vials of sand, Kirsch raises issues of death, memory, romanticism, and family to show the ways that the tight focus is actually about the big picture.
Villa Negativa is a collection of three intensely personal reflections rendered
in precise language and spanning an emotional range so wide
that readers should do some mental stretching before reading the book.
While examining anorexia, a failed or failing relationship, and a sister’s
long, agonizing illness, McCartney manages to expose humour, so that
the reader is compelled forward even as we are anxious about how
things are going to come out in the end. The book’s subtitle, “A Memoir
in Verse” is, perhaps, a non‐starter for a discussion about form. Written
in poetic way and using couplets and short stanzas, these pieces are
poems, and are also beautifully crafted, and very readable personal
essays. In some ways, the text defies categorization, but does it matter?
What is more important is the voice that looks back in retrospect at
troubled times and hones and polishes until the very richness of those
dark events begins to shine.
In this follow up to her 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection,
Jane Munro uses prose lines and shorter poetic structures to create
contemplative forms. By taking a close look at the world and specifically
its places, events, and things—jasmine flowers, a turntable, transformation
masks, a glass fishing float—Munro brings exterior
observation inward and encourages the reader to understand the
spiritual importance of what surrounds us, so the glass float of the
title poem becomes a metaphor for the entire book. Like the rest of the
poems in each of the three sections, or perhaps simply like the voice
Munro employs here, the glass ball is made both to contain and to
float, and its horizon reveals fragility as well as imperfections. Ultimately
what is revealed is a poet at the height of her powers.
A “reader” is, of course, one who reads. It can be a (big) selection of
writings, often for the study of a writer or a particular subject, and it
can be a device for viewing things more clearly. In this collection of
essays, Susan Olding weaves the consequential impact that literature
has had on her into the fabric of her examination of life. Her understanding
of her journey through a love affair is interlaced with thinking
about Anna Karenina; she thinks her way through stepmotherhood
partly through remembering wicked stepmothers of folklore. The
result is a book in which the parts make up a remarkable whole. The
structure of the collection is extraordinary—ideas mentioned in early
pieces recur in more detail later, in the way that a minor character
might become important to the events of a novel and a small life event
might seem significant later when we see that it is part of a pattern.
Olding is also a poet and fiction writer and the full range of her extensive
literary skills make this book a compelling read.
The wilderness of Northern Ontario has deep roots in the Canadian
settler psyche, especially in contrast to the urban landscapes of
Toronto and Montreal. The poems in Dominique Béchard’s debut collection
inhabit this territory, where “the mosquito’s kingdom of cool”
and the “woodland noises” create “a solemn sense being / in catastrophe’s
vicinity or way.” There is a Northern Ontario gothic sensibility
that haunts the work in this collection where the timber wolf is a
“sentinel / to what evaporates” and there is “dope keeping us young /
until it doesn’t.” These are lovely, smart lyric poems of longing and
loss, and are also a celebration of the difficulties of life. In their own
complicated way, they are even poems of hope.
—Jay Ruzesky