Kim Fahner : Cattail Skyline, by Joanne Epp

Cattail Skyline, Joanne Epp
Turnstone Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

If you’ve been to the prairie provinces, then you’ve likely fallen in love with the fields and the sky—with the vast, open spaces that make you feel humble and quiet inside. If you read Joanne Epp’s Cattail Skyline, you’ll begin to think—again, likely—of how landscape and place form and transform us. Epp’s poems take the reader from the open spaces of the prairie to memories of a 1994 trip to Cambodia, and then even into Ontario on a train trip. The numbered “Cemetery road” poems lace themselves through the collection, as one of the key motifs of journeys—by foot, car, plane, and rail—is explored by the poet.

The first poem in the Cattail Skyline, “Cemetery road 1,” invites the reader in, makes them long for a wild road trip without a specific destination in mind. Epp writes: “A crow call. Open space and a road. Not just any road,/but this one leaving the little town where you went to/high school, where you still come every summer.” In this first piece, the poet establishes the idea of how people tend to return to their earliest origin places, traveling back to first homes and towns with a mix of excitement and dread, wondering how those places might have transformed themselves over the years. 

Hers is a poetry that is observational and full of keen descriptive detail. In “Lanigan Creek,” Epp writes: “Swaying on cattails, the blackbirds--/yellow-headed, red-winged—see it all.” In “Image in a country church,” the first line sings: “Sunday, white clapboard unbearably bright.” Here is a little church, in Horse Lake, Saskatchewan, where glory is “declared/in morning rays through arched windows,/shining the varnished pews.” In the “Omand’s Creek” series of poems, the poet writes a poem for each month of the year, letting the reader experience how the landscape of the creek shapeshifts through the seasons. There are warblers, mourning doves, maples, sparrows, catfish, and footbridges. It’s refreshing to be able to sink into these twelve calendar poems, taking into consideration whether humans do enough to mind those wilder spaces. In “Alert (March),” she writes: “You, too, watch for signs/of what’s coming. You listen hard/for the sound of meltwater, wait to be told/how to love the world.” Reading Cattail Skyline reminds you of how to look very closely, mindfully, and then asks you to consider your place—in your life and in the world.

The Cambodia poems, cushioned in the centre of the book, are just as detailed as the Canadian prairie ones. In “Breathless,” Epp speaks of the culture shock that comes with visiting a new country: “…knowing coconuts grow/on trees is not the same/as tipping a fresh one to your mouth/and drinking its sweet juice.” There are girls who hold bowls full of flower petals, heat that makes a person wilt, “three broken Buddhas,” a temple where there are old nuns and monks “in orange-yellow robes,” and a length of vibrant silk that is “sapphire blue shot with purple.” There’s a different kind of vibrancy here, in contrast to the imagery of the Canadian prairies, but the same careful attention to detail and senses in the imagery.

The notion of travel, and of coming and going, but also of practicing how to be still and observant is a through line in the book. In “Here,” the poet writes of her family history, in terms of how it is fixed to a specific place: “This is the tamarack we planted./These are the spaces in our midst./This is where we gather in the evenings.” The train poems clustered together in “Thirty Day Pass” let the reader escape a bit, travel alongside the poet. There are images of trees and lakes that “flow through our sleep,” place names that pass by with quick shutter clicks, and sleep that will only come after midnight when “fields give way to forest, when the chain/of moonlight breaks.” Hardly wanting to miss a minute of watching what passes by outside the train window, Epp speaks, too, of how what happens inside a train—while watching and meeting new people—is transformative. In “Chance,” the scent of bergamot in Earl Grey tea is a nudge to think of how life’s experiences often slip “into memory’s inner pocket, where only chance/could find them.” So much of Cattail Skyline is about how place, memory, history, and being mindfully present in each moment is valuable.   

The poems of the prairies, though, are the ones that—for someone like me, who has grown up in Northern Ontario—seem especially evocative. Maybe that’s just because any new landscape is exotic and something new to explore, but I found the expanses inside the poems—of sky and fields and long prairie roads and life—made me think of how we travel back to our home places in so many different ways. Joanne Epp’s Cattail Skyline is a collection that sings of the beauty of the prairies, and of how memory and nostalgia is tied to landscape, and of how poetry can root itself firmly in all of these things.

 

 

 

 

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 Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Angeline Schellenberg : An interview with Joanne Epp

 

 

In Cattail Skyline, her second full-length collection with Turnstone Press, Winnipeg poet Joanne Epp really does make you feel as if you’ve “just walked through a doorway in the air” where life is stirring on many atmospheric layers at once. With its deceptively plain language, like a scraggly-haired rambutan from Cambodia“you have to take it in whole.” During National Poetry Month 2021, I talked with Epp about country roads, mythical trees, and why she hopes her readers can put her book down.—Angeline Schellenberg

AS: Hi Joanne. I loved your first book Eigenheim, which I understand means “one’s own home,” launched exactly six years ago. How would you say Cattail Skyline is different from your debut collection?

JE: Eigenheim was a search for home—as a place and a state of being. Cattail Skyline takes home as a given and explores new places…and familiar ones in new ways. 

AS: Tell me about the title. Besides the fact that it was an excuse for a gorgeous sky-blue cover, why Cattail Skyline?

JE: What I notice, and hope my readers see, are the different levels in the Prairie landscape: of course, there’s the sky, and there’s what you see at ground level, when you crouch low. Then when you go down the creekbank, that’s another level altogether: the cattails become your skyline. I find those changes in perspective interesting. Small things down low catch my attention.

AS: How did Cattail Skyline come together?

JE: I tend to start with something particular, with an image—say a road to the cemetery or a flower by the creek—and the themes develop as I keep writing. I began thinking of these poems as the beginnings of a manuscript way back in 2008, while putting together my application for the Poetry Colloquium at Sage Hill. What I had thought of as several separate series of poems turned out to have themes that related to each other in interesting ways. There has been a lot of adding and revising, and some subtracting, since then, but that was the start.

AS: Most of the poems about a particular place, such as Star Lake Camp in Whiteshell Provincial Park, are grouped together, but the Cemetery Road prose poems are scattered between the other series. How do those pieces function within the collection?

JE: That arrangement was Jennifer Still’s suggestion. When my editor Alice Major asked, “Does this collection have a single arc? What is its shape?” I said, “It’s a path with several branches.” The Cemetery Road is the path that leads through the book, and the other sections are the trails leading off it.

AS: Speaking of the editing process, when I went through my first book, I found far too many socks. Is there a word you realized you use over and over in this book?

JE: Trees, trees, trees!

AS: I noticed that. I found at least 75 references to trees, including 13 different species. Why are you so drawn to trees?

JE: It’s possible there are theological underpinnings. Certain things have stuck in my mind, such as one of my professors at Canadian Mennonite Bible College talking about how the biblical story is bracketed by images of trees—the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life (Genesis 2:9) reappears in the vision of a reborn Creation in Scripture’s final chapter: “and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

AS: Do you have a favourite poem or section in Cattail Skyline? Why?

The first one that comes to mind is the Omand’s Creek series, about the park near my home, because it’s so cohesive, with a poem for each month as the landscape shifts. I like the way I take that small area of ground and see so much in it.

AS: “Blue hills,” the section set in Cambodia, is unique—how does it speak to the rest of this book about the Canadian Prairie?

JE: One of the main threads of the book is how we connect to a place. When I visited Cambodia for my work with Mennonite Central Committee in 1994, I was absorbed in an unfamiliar place. The poems are me reflecting on how it’s not quite possible to know a place, despite that immersive experience. I didn’t write the Cambodia poems right when I got home. There were so many sensory impressions I had to let settle. Years later, an uncle asked, “What happened to you there?” This series is my attempt at an answer.

AS: As I read, I had the sense of the Prairie buildings and bones disappearing under layers of silt. Is there a sense that you feel as foreign on the Prairies as in Cambodia because of how the land—or you—are constantly changing?

JE: That’s true. The British geographer Doreen Massey says our memories are tied as much to time as to place; they’re memories of places in a particular time. When we return in another season or decade, we’re visiting a different place.

AS: So can we ever feel at home in a place?

JE: I think so. What you gain after a long time of caring for a place is a sense of attachment. What you have to steer away from is a sense of possession: my creek, my lake. It’s better to speak, as Jenna Butler does in her book A Profession of Hope, of “landscapes we belong to.”

AS: Would you call this an environmental book?

I know there are books of poetry that talk in a more elegiac way or angry way about environmental damage. I couldn’t do that; it’s just too sad. But what I could do is be attentive and write as carefully as I could about the places I’ve become attached to. A book I read recently said that in talking about climate crisis, where you have to start is with love and gratitude. Because love and gratitude imply a relationship of interdependence, one that acknowledges we’re not separate from the rest of creation. There’s no such thing as “the environment”: there’s the world and we’re a part of it. 

AS: What experience do you hope to leave with your readers?

JE: My first thought is I want them to go for a walk!

AS: So you’re not concerned that your book could convince readers to put it down and head outdoors instead?

JE: Not at all. I walk all the time: to get to places, get exercise, clear my head. It’s the way I explore. I’m happy to think others might find the same enjoyment in it.

AS: But you aren’t always moving: I counted 22 occurrences of the word still in Cattail Skyline, both in the imperative to “be still” and in the reflection on what is still here.

JE: I hadn’t picked up on that. But the two meanings are connected: in that quiet observation, you can pay attention to what’s still there and what has changed.

AS: Thank you for reminding us to keep our eyes open.

 

 

Joanne Epp is the author of Eigenheim (Turnstone Press, 2015) and the chapbooks Crossings (2012) and Nothing But Time (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Canadian Literature, and other journals; her collaborative translations with Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen have appeared in The Polyglot. Her second full-length collection, Cattail Skyline, has just been published by Turnstone Press. She lives in Winnipeg.

Angeline Schellenberg wrote Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), a collection about raising children on the autism spectrum, which won three Manitoba Book Awards. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. The host of Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline recently launched Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). She loves talking to dogs and eating other people’s baking.