If There Were Roads — Joanna Lilley (Turnstone Press)

Today's book of poetry:
If There Were Roads.  Joanna Lilley.  Turnstone Press.  Winnipeg, Manitoba.  2017.

Joanna Lilley is very much a poet of place.  Geography plays a big part in her narrative of If There Were Roads.  The particulars of geography may sometimes confuse the reader because Lilley both writes about where she is — and where she isn't.

The constant is Lilley herself, her keen eyes and wickedly sharp pen.  Lilley makes a strong argument that we are shaped by geography and our place in it.  It is a simple concept but a far more complicated actuality.  Joanna Lilley navigates the territory of the present like an enlightened cartographer whose keen ear remembers and makes way for the past.

Bluebird

My boyfriend had a vision:

my bicycle chucked in a truck;

It would be red, he said.

As if he'd ever been to Canada.

A man I served at the bar asked

if I was going still, now the desert war

was on. I should carry a gun, another said.

As if he'd ever been to Canada.

It was twenty years ago today, the day

I started. A long bicycle ride,

drawing corners on a ragged country,

I stretched six thousand miles

to fit in enough aloneness

after all the cram of England.

Len the long-haul trucker saw me twice

on his trans-Canada run.

The third time, he came out of a cafe

as I went in. Fourth run, he bought me supper

at a truck stop. A salad, for a vegetarian,

with jelly and marshmellows.

He'd got out of Keeseekoose, saved

for a semi that cost more than a house

and made it home. He hadn't seen

his daughter for half her six-year life,

didn't know if he still had a wife.

Len said I shouldn't camp. He offered

me his bunk. We slept beside each other

after he got back ache on the front seat

and asked to share. When I left, he gave

me a song on a dirty, cracked cassette.

Anne Murray's Bluebird.

Not my thing but beautiful.

He said he meant it. That was Saskatchewan.

Chester in Nova Scotia had seen me too.

He made me pancakes. Marc in New Brunswick

took me home for apple pie.

He told me he had a girlfriend.

Ray — Ontario — kept giving me food,

said I must eat as I cycled along. I left

the helmet he gave in a campground.

Women didn't feed me.

Alice in Ontario said she was jealous:

all that time to think. Marianne

cried because I was on my own.

In Manitoba, Judy the teacher caught

me camping at the school.

I slept in her white house

down by the sunken Birdtail River,

a riddle of hills that were really the prairie

above. Helen in Alberta called me

a fellow traveller, told me the bird I'd heard

since Quebec was just a wood thrush.

It wasn't supposed to be about the people.

It was the land I wanted: skies, the muskeg,

taiga, the bear who crossed the highway,

the coyote who followed me, the foxes

who watched. In the Yukon, Julie

took me to her cabin on the Dempster.

It took me fifteen years to make it back.

As if I could live anywhere but Canada.

💫💫💫

If There Were Roads does concern itself with matters beyond geography.  Lilley dares to venture into the open and endless plain of the emotional landscape.  This is where Joanna Lilley really shines.

If There Were Roads got carried around quite a bit in the last ten days.  It spent several hours at various medical institutions as well as an over-night trip to a hometown funeral.  Whenever Today's book of poetry picked up If There Were Roads we found another of the myriad destinations Lilley serves up on a banquet platter.  It was better than carrying maps.

Just a Man

I wish I could be just a man

passing by a row of shops.

A man as ordinary as a road with potholes,

as a bridge across a river frilled with brown foam,

or the tugboats of a working firth.

A man where urban is normal,

where a park is unremarkable,

where dogs walk without pulling

and pigeons peck at screwed up burger wrappers.

I wish I was a man in a jacket, collar down,

a little fashion in my trouser leg, passing by

a doorway, a yellow skip, a litter bin,

past men and women at the bus stop

who barely notice me.

I wish I didn't care that the sun has set,

that the street lights have come on,

creating shadows,

and I'm still half a mile from home.

💫💫💫

When Joanna Lilley talks about such things as gender it is without bile.  A man becomes "as ordinary as a pothole."  Lilley's poetry is lush with thoughtful consideration given to the small moments that make up our existence, the detailed moments that make us human.

Tom the Wolfe made it abundantly clear "that we can't go home again."  Jack of Kerouac told us how to live "on the road," while Joanna Lilley charts a path where place is something inside the individual, to be carried wherever need be.

Can the solace we need and seek be manufactured by the strength of self, Today's book of poetry believes that Lilley does believe just that.  Then the knowing where are inside is the only direction one needs.

Where I Was Born

I am not just from where I was born;

I am from where I've lived.

On Dartmoor's sheep-cropped edges,

beside golden, bouldered tors.

A shingle beach, a chalky sea,

a land to a preceptory.

A valley, a waterfall, a cairn.

And, yes, that first rough field

of shaggy grass in Cambridgeshire

my parents brought me home to.

A brown pond, a thatched roof

over a weak floor, a sheepdog

watching my pram. For I was born

within the sound of horses' hooves,

across the county line in Suffolk

farthest from the Bow Bells

of the litter. My siblings

can have their London births.

My first breath yanked sheets of air

from fens as far as sea, from roofs

with spaces in between.

I have sought those spaces ever since

and found them even in the boughs

of plane trees on a city street.

They stay with me, these spaces.

I've brought them here to the forest edge,

where land might still be sacred.

Though far from field and moor and sea

I am at last where I need to be.

💫💫💫

We are in a slightly dishevelled office here at Today's book of poetry.  Much is afoot, including a lovely red "coffee table" that has become a central and critical component to our entire operation.  It is sitting on top of Today's book of poetry's desk.  Today's book of poetry has been distracted by reasons beyond your amusement, but Joanna Lilley's If There Were Roads has been close company and reminding us of what really matters.

There is a haunting, to come after, feeling to these poems.  A knowing, that once read, you'll want to travel this road again.

Joanna Lilley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanna Lilley is an award-winning poet living in Whitehorse. Born in the UK, Joanna has always been drawn north, crossing the Arctic Circle twice, before settling in the Yukon. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Malahat Review and Grain. If There Were Roads is her second collection of poetry.

BLURBS
Joanna Lilley claims in her poem “Two Ghosts” that “it wasn’t supposed to be about the people,” yet that is exactly what If There Were Roads is about—people and what they do to the bodies of animals; people on journeys accompanied by ghosts, and myth, and crows; people both lost and at home. Lilley’s journey takes us into the cycles of the seasons where certainty exists only in acute observation and reflection. If There Were Roads is haunting and luscious, full of place and heart.
     — Micheline Maylor, Little Wildheart

Poems of place and displacement, of leaving home and finding home, move seamlessly through inner and outer landscapes in Lilley’s lively, evocative collection. Arresting and captivating, If There Were Roads is poetry brimming with new ways of seeing.
     —Catherine Graham, The Celery Forest   

turnstonepress.com 

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The Order In Which We Do Things - The Poetry of Tom Wayman, selected with an introduction by Owen Percy (Wilfred Laurier University Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Order In Which We Do Things.  The Poetry of Tom Wayman, selected with an introduction by Owen Percy.  The Laurier Poetry Series/Wilfred Laurier University Press.  Waterloo, Ontario.  2014.

The following quote comes from Tom Wayman's Afterword: Work and Silence:

"I have tried to create art that is useful to people engaged in striving for beneficial social change."

I've been reading the very engaging and socially demanding poetry of Tom Wayman for almost forty years.  When I find one of his books it is an occasion.  There are few poets I admire more, so it is with that in mind that I was thrilled to see The Order In Which We Do Things.

The Laurier Poetry Series is an essential for Canadian letters, and in this case Owen Percy has done Wayman proud.

Days: Construction

Days when the work does not end.
When the bath at home is like
cleaning another tool of the owner's.
A tool which functions better with the dust gone from its pores.
So that tomorrow the beads of sweat
can break out again along trouser-legs and sleeves.

And then bed,
Night. The framing continues
inside the head: hammers pound on
through the resting brain. With each blow
the nails sink in, inch by blasted inch.
Now one bends, breaking the rhythm.
Creaks as it's tugged free. A new spike
is pounded in.

The ears ring with it. In the dark
this is the room where construction is.
Blow by blow, the studding goes up.
The joists are levered into place.
The hammers rise.

...

I've worked construction, not for long periods of time, but I've blistered up my hands, climbed those ladders, hammered those nails, had the sunburns, the long hours, dreamt work.

If you are like me Wayman is that smart uncle type character you consult when you want to know better.  He writes with his heart and soul set to honest.

No one in Canada knows the working man/woman better.

A Cursing Poem: This Poem Wants Gordon Shrum To Die
               1971

This poem wants to hurt another person.
This poem wants another person to die.
It wants him to suddenly stumble
feel a sharp pain just under the belly
a harsh pain, one that rips him so hard inside that he shits himself.
The poem wants him to become dizzy
feel a rush of sweat on the face
to begin to shiver, and have to be helped into bed.
The poem wants his teeth to chatter, wants him to throw up
gasping for air, wants mucus to pour from his nose and mouth.
It wants him to die in the night.

This poem wants Gordon Shrum to die.
First because despite all his company's rules and tariffs
despite every regulation they tell the press they apply
his company turned off the heat and light in the house.
They did this without warning, when the temperature was forty
             degrees by day
and the nights begin at four o'clock.
So that after working all day, the body could come home
to a room of black ice.

So after straining all day at the jobsite, with the fingers
numb at the hammer and slipping under the weight of the heavy
            boards
after the back was twisted trying to hoist the load of a wheelbarrow
the rest of the body could return to darkness and cold.

This poem also wants Gordon Shrum to die
because his company charges twenty-five cents every day
for the bus to carry you to work. And because you must
pay the same every evening to wait in the cold
to be jerked and stopped and jerked and stopped
all the way back to the house. Fifty cents a day
taken out of the dollars squeezed from the body's labour
so at the end of the day, the body can be hauled to where it stays
            overnight
can enter the black bedrooms, be lit by a candle
and eat bread and cold milk.

Lastly the poem wants Gordon Shrum to die
because at a meeting he reached over to my friend Mark Warrior
and smacked him in the mouth.
He was charged and acquitted
because Mark was shouting out at the time how the French
were finally getting off their knees
and striking back at the bullies that push them, at men like
            Shrum
--whom Mark didn't name.

But whom I name, with his bureaucrats and service division
his credit office and transportation system. Him, and
every other animal who is gnawing away at our lives.
May before they die
they know what it is like to be cold, may the cold eat into them
may they live so they cough all night and can't sleep
and have to get up the next morning for work just the same.
May the joints of their bodies swell with their labour
and their backs ache. And before they die
may they know deeply, to the inside of their stomachs
the meaning of a single word:
unemployment. May they understand it
as the nourishment a man gets by scraping the calendar over a
             pan for a meal.
May they have a future with nothing in it
but unemployment; may the end of welfare.

May they have to travel by bus
to get their welfare. May they wake at night and realize
that for the rest of their lives they will never eat together
all the things they love: steak and wine and hot corn.
They will never have these together again until they die.
May they die on welfare.
And may the Lord God Jesus have mercy on their souls.

...

Tom Wayman does controlled anger and justified vitriol better than anyone.

Thomas Ethan Wayman was born in Hawkesbury, Ontario, which is reasonably close to Ottawa.  He has lived most of his life in British Columbia.  These poems, an excellent sampling from his numerous collections, remind us of how Canadian Wayman is.  The sort of Canadian I want to be.

For many of us these poems remind us of how to be Canadian, at least a particular version, socially conscious, socially concerned, trying to be better citizens of the world.

Breath

          i

Tufts of snow
that rise from the branch
a chickadee alights on

          ii

Winter fog surrounding
the house: on the frosted slope of
the ridge behind, great spruce and pine
blur to white shadows

          iii

Straw-coloured humps of grass
interspersed with blotches of snow
are perfectly reflected
on the still surface
of the current

          iv

As I ski the river trail
--poles and legs scissoring
like a pendulum--
over me bursts a flight of
tundra swans:
V of white necks, white streamlined bodies

lifting into blue

the mouth of this world
                                      exhaling

...

And of course it isn't just a social exercise, Tom Wayman knows all about beauty, the breath a poem can give to the reader.

Tom Wayman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Wayman has published nineteen poetry collections, edited six anthologies of poets writing about their employment, and published three collections of essays on labour arts. He has taught at the post-secondary level in the United States and Canada and co-founded the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union and the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing. Wayman has been the recipient of several significant literary awards over his career, most recently the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry for his book Dirty Snow.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Owen Percy is a teacher, writer, editor, and critic of North American and postcolonial literature. He earned his Ph.D. in Canadian literature and literary culture from the University of Calgary in 2010. He is a professor of literary studies at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario

BLURB

“Wayman...believes that poetry exists beyond ‘the money economy’ and because of this freedom it creates the highest potential to drive social change. His concerns are humanist and folksy, infused with the moral responsibility of integrity. This series, because of its...scope and space...allows the reader to see how Wayman’s immersions in these moral concerns have developed and morphed from those of the lowly factory worker to those of acute environmental observance. Always the poems are permeated by intense attention to...a sense of justice.”

     — Micheline Maylor, Alberta Views

Tom Wayman

video by Amy Bohigian

wlupress.wlu.ca 

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