Conversations with the
Kagawong River, sophie anne edwards
Talon, 2024
It’s refreshing to read a Northern Ontario poet who has so fully rooted her debut book of poems, Conversations with the Kagawong River, in a very specific place that is sacred to so many people. Sophie Anne Edwards has drawn on her previous works, entering the spaces where the natural world and language dance together in mystical ways that conjure the spirit of the place that is Manitoulin Island. As a settler, Edwards situates herself, in the very first pages of the collection, as someone who has learned to listen to, and learn from, Manitoulin’s elders rather than to risk thoughtlessly filling the spaces with uninformed talk or chatter. Conversations with the Kagawong River opens with testimonial pieces from Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere, a historian and language advocate from M’Chigeeng First Nation and York University, Art Jacko, who is the CAO and Band Manager of M’Chigeeng First Nation, and Josh Eshkawkogan, who is from Wiikwemkoong First Nation and is elder in residence at the Noojmowin Teg Health Centre. All three men speak to the careful way in which Edwards has approached her work as an artist. This is a wise approach to creating a book of poems that is hybrid in its essence and is written by a settler rather than by an Indigenous writer.
The word ‘hybrid’ suits Conversations with the Kagawong River in a very truthful way. Edwards includes historic maps of Manitoulin Island, creates concrete and found poetry from the text of the historic documents of the 1862 Manitoulin Island treaty (Treaty 94), letters, journals, and photographs, and also offers her readers a reference guide to the Anishinaabemowin words that are woven through the book. One of the most beautiful aspects of the book is that Edwards ventures out into the landscape of the river, leaving paper letters in the middle of bunches of cattails, or floating around the petals of water lilies, revisiting them afterwards—at intervals—to see if they are still there, or if they have decayed because of their exposure to the elements. She makes sketches and takes handwritten notes, documenting the decomposition of the paper letters over time. All of this, when a reader takes time with the book—returning to read it more than once—adds to the overall understanding that the elements and weather patterns are holistically part of the natural world and environment of the Kagawong River. This is eco-poetry, so the pieces in Conversations with the Kagawong River can be seen as warnings for readers to take more time in being mindful of their surroundings when out in the natural world.
One of the key thematic aspects of these poems is that active listening is key to better understanding (or entering) the ecosystems of a specific place. The river becomes a microcosm of the whole world’s well-being in terms of climate change and crisis. Edwards writes of the otters, birds, plants, fish, and vegetation of the area. Anyone who has been to Bridal Veil Falls will nod when they read “Spawning Salmon,” as Edwards writes from the point of view of the fish: “tourists snap/photos/to the rhythm of//seagull hopping/we return to this/claimed territory.” By the end of the piece, the salmon is anthropomorphized as it speaks to describe how “I prefer the quiet twilight/when all that is heard/is the River//a seagull swallows my/eye/and laughs.” In the piece that is thoughtfully placed on the opposite page, “Ed Burt, Salmon Stories,” the poem takes on the shape of a circle, making the reader think about what kinds of ideas should be at the centre of things in terms of what is most important to consider.
Edwards puts Burt’s words inside the circle as he speaks about the way in which pickerel were introduced to Lake Kagawong in the 1960s from the Spanish River. He has the historical knowledge of place that is required. In this fascinating found poem, Edwards has immediately nudged the reader to think about how invasive species have been historically introduced to Manitoulin by colonial and oppressive organizations. Burt’s words are powerful as he, a settler, speaks about wealthy tourists who come from away: “If you’re rich enough to own a thirty-thousand-dollar boat and troll for hours and catch one—well, it’s not my idea of fishing.” This place, which is so sacred to Indigenous communities of Northeastern Ontario, is at risk of environmental decline if it’s not protected by everyone who lives there. That, too, is another theme that makes itself known in Edwards’s work.
Throughout Conversations with the Kagawong River, the poet records her thoughts in diary dated entries, documenting her wishes, thoughts, and actions. In the entry titled “May 22,” Edwards writes: “I consider attaching a letter and a QR code to each ash with a link to a map,” so that she can map out the gaps in the forest’s canopy. She ends the piece with a heartfelt desire: “I wonder if I can join the grass before I die. Become grass and mud./Move beyond the limits of my body. I print a poem and punch holes/into the paper. I want to plant it somewhere along the River.” If you’re a northerner, you’ll know this feeling, of wanting to enter the beauty of this wild landscape body and soul, and maybe not return. Here is a place of possibility, of extending the physical self into the essence of a poem on paper, of planting it “where grass might grow up through the words.” Maybe, I kept thinking as I read Conversations, we all want to find meaning through experience, pushing through our own rough edges so that “the boundaries between human and plant” begin to disappear, as Edwards suggests.
One of my favourite parts of the book of poems is a series of pieces that focus on Bridal Veil Falls. When I was young, in the 1970s, I remember it being a place to visit, but in recent decades—and especially since the pandemic when southerners fled to the northern parts of Ontario to find respite so that they could be escape their big cities to be outside during lockdown—it’s turned into a circus of sorts. I remember, too, being there in my 20s, in the mid-late 1990s, with a few friends, and the four of us just being completely on our own while watching the salmon fight their way upstream to the falls. That would rarely happen now, given the marked increase in tourism congestion over the last few years.
Edwards points out the rush of people, using the volume of visitors to experiment in gathering their views of the falls. In “Gathered Words from Visitors to the Falls,” she boxes a found poem inside the frame of more faded words—spliced with vertical photographic slices of what the falls look like. The ‘inside poem’ is a found one, with words that were scribbled down by visitors, as she describes in “August 4”: “I have set a lidded wooden box on/another piece of limestone./In the box are pieces of birchbark found on the ground along the trail,/pencils and pens/a notebook, along with an invitation to write something/for or about the River/to send a message down the River on a piece of birch.”
This experiment reminds me of the work that Ariel Gordon has done in Winnipeg with her conversations with trees, as she invites people in their respective neighbourhoods to write messages to hang around the trunks (or from the branches) of trees, as notes of thanks, or even as confessional tales. This notion, of having the poet facilitate a conversation between humans and the natural world, is an intriguing and powerful one. The photos in Conversations, of Bridal Veil Falls on a busy tourist weekend, are surprising in terms of the volume of people, but also touching in terms of the tender photo of one person bent over Edwards’s wooden box on the limestone rock, writing their note to the river on a piece of birchbark.
In a world where we are so often over-stimulated by the noise that we ourselves create, the work that Sophie Anne Edwards does here, in Conversations with the Kagawong River, is the sort that is important in how it draws the reader into a consideration of how we humans converse with/in the natural world. Do we speak too loudly, or do we take the time to sit quietly on a riverbank to listen actively? What does the river (or the lake, of the hike through the bush, or the birds, or the moose) teach us? What Edwards is asking her readers to consider is our place in the natural world. If we are settlers and allies, we have a role to play, too, in learning and respecting the lessons of our many wilder spaces. Edwards’s work is a hybrid poetic call to first look outwards—to sit quietly and listen to what lessons come forward with close observations—but then is equally a call to look inwards, to question our own responsibility in terms of how we care for these wild places we love so that future generations will have a chance to love and protect them as well.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl
(Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will
be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her
CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024
essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph
Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of
Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting
member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website
at http://www.kimfahner.com
