all things small, Susan J. Atkinson
Silver Bow Publishing, 2024
The moving and warm-hearted poetry collection, all things small, by the Ottawa poet, Susan J. Atkinson, gives the reader a variety of opportunities by which to sample her overarching compassion, not only for a woman’s life, but for life generally. The collection is broken into the topics of: ‘love’, ‘sorrow’, ‘memory’, ‘divorce’ and ends with the section ‘all things small’, from where the collection takes its title. What this tells us is the poet sees in the small things that rim our lives, universal and profound truths, and through these truths a kind of purposeful meaning.
In the poem ‘Things that Never Come Back’, Atkinson, an elementary school teacher (and I’m assuming, by the interaction in this poem, an exemplary one) asks a nine-year-old to write a list poem. When he writes about things that leave and come back (yo-yos, the tide, for example), in order to challenge, the poet asks him to write about things that leave but do not return. The final lines read:
His new poem had
one line –
my father.
Not only does this poem show us Atkinson’s kind imagination in her dealings with the child, but it also shows us how her appreciation for the simple, yet heart breaking, admission of this child holds such deep meaning and pathos. And I think it illustrates something fundamental about the poet’s vision and her approach to what she sees as poetry’s gift. She realises it has the ability to make us focus on the small but crucial aspects of the everyday, and that in these aspects we can see the whole fabric of a life and what is universal and links us in our joint humanity.
In the poem, ‘This Past Month’, where the topic is loss and change, Atkinson lovingly speaks of her daughter, and how the poet and her mate are also searching for a way to deal with loss – in this case, the loss of parents:
Our youngest daughter
collects small pebbles,
curled bark of birch trees,
rocks with eyes,
small things to bury loss.
We, too, look for ways.
Atkinson gives us profound moments from her life that, in turn, link to our own lives – from the experience of romantic love, the sadness of loss, the erosion of memory and the heartbreak of divorce. She acknowledges that the small things which holds such significance for this collection are not small but universal in import. They are the elements that allow us to share the most intimate of thoughts and emotions, to see in her work our own life, with its challenges and losses and loves.
It would be impossible to not relate to the situation described in the poem ‘How Can Things Die on a Morning Such As This?’, with its urge to:
Look closely. Already, summer blooms
bend their heads, their brown-tinged
leaves hang tired like crepe paper
followed by this sad but tender explanation:
This is how it happens:
a beloved parent dies,
soon the other follows.
Loss cradles the space
between heart and rib
and grief becomes a shadow,
shares its mo(u)rning with sorrow.
I want to say to the poet, yes, I know these emotions, this heartbreak, for here in such consummate language I can feel the commonality of sorrow, a commonality that allows us empathy and a sense of community as we struggle to find meaning in the inexplicable. For here, in this collection, is a vision that is steeped in warm-hearted certainty, a vision of fundamental kindness, our better selves in fact. It is ultimately a generous view – open-hearted and inclusive – and even though what Atkinson may give us is a single word or image, it is always a vision that welcomes the universal into its interpretation.
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Deborah-Anne Tunney is a poet, short story writer and novelist who was born and lives in Ottawa. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Canadian, American and U.K. literary journals and anthologies, notably Threepenny Review, Missouri Review, Narrative among others. Her linked short story collection, The View from the Lane (2014) and her novel Winter Willow (2019) were published by Enfield and Wizenty. Her first book of poetry A Different Wolf came out in June 2020 from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and won the 2021 Archibald Lampman award.
