Gaspereau Press, 2019
Lindsay Bird’s debut book of poems, Boom Time, is—for
me—one of the most fascinating books of poetry published in 2019. It documents
Bird’s time working in northern Alberta during the oil boom. Originally from
Ontario, but now a Newfoundlander, Bird’s poems speak to the way in which women
in a male-dominated industry were treated in the mid-2000s. She doesn’t flinch
from writing honestly about the misogyny that saturated that particular time
and place in a very tangible way.
The uniquely strange culture of the oil sands boom is
conveyed to the reader from the very first poem in the collection, “First Day
in Fort Mac,” when Bird tells of stumbling “off the bus/in our new boots to
see/what eats grass and what eats us.” In “All I Have to Say About Calgary,”
the wisdom is that a city can offer what is most needed when you work in the
tar sands: “What a good place/to buy a pair of shoes.” From start to end, the
poems track a woman’s arrival in a new place, far from home, and then log the
ways in which that world works.
In the four-parted “Yarn,” Bird writes of the harassment
she faced in her work. In “I,” she receives a note that is slipped under her
door, reading: “U SHOULD STOP NITTING ON THE BUS.” In “II,” the voice is more
ominous: “where’s that girl/who knits/where is she//bitch/complained//can’t
take a compliment…what trailer is she in do you know?” In the two-parted “Meal
Hall,” there are the men whose “glances grow/to outright ogles” so that the
poet posits: “must be the time/zone that makes/them all forget/etiquette.”
Then, more horribly, the man who yells out “Hey sugartits!//Sugar
tits?//Now/I’m dessert/too. Who/knew?” Still, there is the comfort in finding Jim,
in “III,” who teaches her to knit, in “A good two weeks,/those evenings of
purl.”
Being a visible minority, in amidst the men who worked
in the oil sands, couldn’t have been easy for any woman who worked there then.
One of the most telling poems in the collection is “Other Women,” a piece that
tells of how so many women “are out here,/in sweaters plain/as prairie
grass./We don’t know/each other’s names,/faces dim like/frosted glass.” It’s as
if all of the women have made themselves ‘less than’ so that they don’t draw
attention to themselves, so that they aren’t noticed by the men, and so that
harassment is hopefully avoided.
In Boom Time, there is evidence of the real risk
that workers undertake in Canadian communities that are structured around
industries that deal with natural resource extraction. In the heart wrenching
poem, “Safety Reminder,” the poet writes of how quickly a person can lose their
life: “Donnie’s last sound was a boot/slip, sucked fifty feet down//into the
tailings pond with the rest of him,/boiled in a banished concoction of
chemistry.”
Make no mistake, though. There is beauty in Boom
Time, too, in the images and metaphors that Bird uses so artistically in
her work. Often, Canadian communities and towns that deal with natural resource
extraction seem to have layers hidden underneath their rough external landscapes.
There are always the small details of beauty that seem to emerge when you least
expect them to. In “Rager at Gregoire Lake,” there is a dusk that “touches dawn,”
and an aurora that “giggles/upside down.” In “Cubs of Love,” there is the rude
interruption of an early morning alarm that “divides/linen and limbs, limbs
and/layers” of new intimacy. And, in “Say You Got The Flu,” the first stanza
shines when Bird writes: “Graced by the patron saints/of playing hooky/with
sunshine and the Athabasca/suspended in solid ice,” on a day stolen away from
work.
What Boom Time does, and why it’s so wonderful,
really, is that Lindsay Bird transports a reader who has never been out to the
western Canadian tar sands to that very place, and documents a time in history
that will not be again. It also, though, reminds us of how misogyny still lives
in the careers where men and women do the same work, even in this newest
century. The poet’s honesty and keen eye makes this a book of poems that I
return to over and over again.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the
first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings
(Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the
Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of
Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be
reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com
