Forecast: Pretty Bleak,
Chris Bailey
McClelland & Stewart, 2025
One of the poems in the middle of Chris Bailey’s new book of poetry, Forecast: Pretty Bleak, begins with a single line that echoes in the reader’s mind: “I want to tell you things of this place.” This is something that Bailey explored in his previous collection, What Your Hands Have Done (Harbour Publishing, 2018), witnessing and documenting the place that he knows so well—a fishing community on Prince Edward Island. It’s not a romanticized telling, and it doesn’t read like a glossy tourism advert, which is why Forecast: Pretty Bleak is likely so evocative and tends to draw the reader in. Anyone who’s lived in a town that has an economy based on a resource (like fishing, mining, or logging) will likely find this book resonates. They are all different industries, but the same types of hard working, down to earth people who pay attention to the rhythms of a daily life as they work away at a task to pay bills and take care of their families live in such places.
In the centre section of the book, titled “We Talked About This,” there are thirty numbered poems that establish the setting of the community in which the poet lives and works. The reader gets to know Will, Kenny, Tom, Kyle, Bianca, Brandon, James, and a cast of other people who make their living from—or adjacent to—the sea. Bailey creates the setting using vivid imagery and metaphors, writing “In the lane, mud, the burnt black/grey ash stain/left by garbage lit against a shrinking snowbank. Crows gone.” Then, he continues: “Birdshit streaks shingles on the house’s/south side. Crows pick lobster shells clean/in a garden yet to be tilled.” Later in this same section, the poet writes: “Yesterday, weather on the horizon/toward Cape Breton. Sun rising.//Slate-coloured clouds, their camber,/great columns of rain across the Strait.” Bailey moves from the rhythm of a community’s daily life to the danger of fishing the ocean: “My father’s hand is crushed/between a trap and hauler claw./Blood blooms in latex glove./White slough of dead skin.” In a moment, the job of fishing can go wrong, threaten lives: “You’d be loon-foolish to not be nervous/come Setting, all that weight, so much/rope gone over, all in thick fog with a rock/on from the north, and the tide against you.” A day’s work on the ocean can turn quickly: “When we go to sink the traps that first day:/nor’west wind, water whitecapping. A man in a kilt/stands on flagstone, plays bagpipes, his song/sounding like a funeral to each boat sailing out the run.” Nothing can be taken for granted, especially not a safe return to shore.
There’s a tension created by the idea of distance in many of Bailey’s poems, a distance that is both geographical and emotional. A love—for both a place and a person—is something that stretches like an elastic, an ebb and flow that pulls between Ontario and PEI. The draw of work and school in the west emerges in poems like “Starting Out”: “Your father’s eyes were pointed to Thompson then,/nickel mines. What they filled with was seawater,/mackerel blood. The scales of herring used as bait.” In “Moved Cross-Country,” the speaker notices the sharp contrast that Ontario provides to PEI, writing: “Lobster traps are décor here. Fishing is for sport.” Returning home, though, means a contemplation of what the notion of hard work means in a person’s life. In the last poem of “We Talked About This,” the poet writes: “You know what work is. We talked about this/before: an act of love. What puts food on the table,/electricity in the filaments…What else could work be?” The value of work comes in the ways a person can “raise four walls and be grateful,” demonstrate love in a tangible, everyday way. Sometimes, work and duty pulls harder at a person than love does, so that work wins out even when you don’t want it to. Sometimes work is woven into love and duty, and to the place where family history is so firmly rooted.
The sense of distance and tension between two lovers is constant in Forecast: Pretty Bleak. In one of the untitled, numbered poems, Bailey writes: “You send pictures of yourself, a video,/and say, I was thinking of you…Is this/how distance is supposed to be?/My eyes shut and I am with you./Why would I want to open them here?” Then, in “You’re Always Leaving,” the poem begins: “She says this, and it’s true:/ leaving the Island, that cradle/that once held you as a father/holds his child’s dog…and you’re always//leaving Ontario: the mainland and promised/new beginning with its cheaper bread/and same-priced potatoes and the place/you rent whose rooms are clear-sky blank.” It ends with “You’re always leaving/though you never want to go/and she don’t seem to want to keep you.” That long distance struggle in a relationship is also present in “Love Letter Written in a PEI Spring,” and in “Toronto,” with its first line: “She hates it here, but don’t think she will/be here long. How she speaks to you/about leaving…This wish she picks/as a herring scale from your hair, blows/away in hopes for it to come true…She cannot let go.” What this gets at, in many ways, is the pull between places, as well. A person can be born in one place and drawn to another—hoping it holds something more rewarding—but that same person can also find themselves torn between two loves, or two histories, or two geographies.
The other thematic aspect that’s present in Forecast: Pretty Bleak is the idea of what ‘home’ represents when you move away from it geographically. The speaker’s father says, “Home is a place the door is never shut” and that voice and its sentiment echoes through the collection. Home is a place that is filled with family history, tales, and the notion of what it means to live on the ocean, to inherit a life that is full of honest, hard, and often dangerous work. When the weather shifts, and a fierce storm moves in, and the house is “a thrumming low-toned tuning fork” while “Broken branches hold house siding./The roof has shingled the yard,” home is the place full of the people you most love and worry about.
Chris Bailey’s second collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak doesn’t feel at all bleak, but rather is realistic in its rhythms and observations. I keep thinking of Bronwen Wallace, who often wrote about how the extraordinary events in a life are discovered by just trying to be more mindful of the ordinary daily routines that we so often take for granted, or just miss in our rush to get from place to place. Bailey’s poems encourage readers to take notice of his observations about the worth of place, family, work, home, love, and even the bittersweet ebb and flow of distance between people and places, but also leave them considering those aspects of their own lives.
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
