Siteseeing, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt
At Bay Press, 2023
Slip into Siteseeing, a collaborative poetic work written by Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt, and find yourself woven into an epistolary love letter to the natural world, but also tied to a warning that humans need to mind what impact their actions have on the environment. Written between February 2021 and March 2022, the pandemic plays a role as both poets document how lockdown impacts their lives. The things that give them respite are their family members and the consistency of the natural world. Both women go out into the world, searching for solace in a time when everything was distanced, taking note of the changes in season, landscape, and weather patterns.
The dialogue is seamless so that, if you didn’t know that Gordon’s poetry was regular font and Schmidt’s was italicized, you’d be drawn into a smooth internal monologue rather than a conversation or dialogue. In the urban centre of Winnipeg, Ariel Gordon writes about her love of trees, referencing the parallel threat of Dutch Elm Disease and Covid-19. In rural Saskatchewan, by contrast, Brenda Schmidt documents the rhythms of a farming life, noting the parallel impact of a drought and a ‘plague’ of grasshoppers. Plagues come in different shapes and sizes, so these parallel situations work effectively to establish a philosophical framework for the collection.
While Gordon writes of “diving in & out/of Assiniboine Forest like it was a pool” and of “an upended grocery cart” in Omand’s Creek, noticing the tiny details of what surrounds her as she walks in wilder spaces, Schmidt speaks of digging wells, crops that are at risk, and of “a month of summer” lost “to wildfires & drought.” In Winnipeg, Gordon encounters a new wave of Covid-19: “I reverse-RSVP/for dim sum with friends,//a concert with another friend,//Sunday dinner with the in-laws,” while Schmidt reflects on a chronic wasting disease that is affecting deer in her region: “That’s near here/where herds of starving deer resorted//to bales & trees last winter.” What will strike you, as you read through Siteseeing, is that—despite the lockdowns and sense of isolation—both women find comfort in seeing poetically, in how they delve into the smallest parts of the everyday natural world. There are “waves of snow/here on the hillside over which//a magpie steers its tail/& shadows sail north/in the cottonwood” in one poet’s place and “just-opened wild/roses & fading blanket flowers//along the trails” in another’s.
Reading this collection feels as if it’s a thank you note to the natural world during a time when the world was turned inside out and upside down. One poet takes off where the other left off, picking up the edge of a metaphorical ribbon that weaves itself through the book. Nothing feels choppy or disconnected in poetic styling and, maybe, just maybe, that’s why Siteseeing is a bit like taking a deep breath in the middle of a historical period that sometimes felt as if the world was somehow both hyperventilating or suffocating at the same time. The oppression of the lockdown is omnipresent in these pieces—in the backgrounds of both poets’ worlds and words—but this just makes the relief of being outside feel more crucial and necessary for survival of spirit and body. Regular daily worries—about health, the wellbeing of family and friends, and even the climate crisis—are lessened by the poets’ sojourns out into fields, or next to creeks and rivers. Siteseeing loops forwards and back, connecting two geographically distanced poet friends through a dialogue that speaks more to connectivity than to isolation.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com