Kim Fahner : Forecast: Pretty Bleak, by Chris Bailey

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

allison calvern : Robert Gibbs, poet, novelist, short story writer, professor, editor, and critic

Robert Gibbs, poet, novelist, short story writer, professor, editor, and critic
3 February 1930 —October 20, 2024

 

 

 

The living room in Robert Gibbs’ house was lined with bookshelves, and there were stacks of books on tables and on the floor. There were more bookshelves in the adjacent dining room, and stacks of books on the dining room table, on the chairs around the table, and on a sideboard—or maybe it was a buffet, I don’t remember; I only remember the books. To move through a room, or from one room to the other, was to follow a winding creek bed, flowing with literature, all of it accessible and teeming with life. Robert could locate from within the shelves and stacks the exact book required to underline whatever point was being made at the time.                 

He had saved a few square feet on the dining room table for his lap top and its faithless companion, the printer, which was a mystery to him. I went to Staples for toner cartridges, and installed them for him, but I was never certain how he got the beast to print anything if I wasn't there to coach him through the process.

We drank many cups of tea together, and at least once we had cocoa, which Robert made the old-fashioned way—milk in a pot on the stove, a scoop of Fry's cocoa, and a spoonful or two of sugar stirred in. The sun streamed in through the back window, turning the cluttered kitchen into a golden oasis, and we talked as we usually did, about a particular poem, maybe, or about one of his novels, while his metal spoon circled the bottom of the pot, willing the cocoa to dissolve. When the milk was sufficiently scalded, and everything mixed to his satisfaction, Robert poured the piping hot cocoa into the two waiting mugs, like a pro, not one spilled drop, and we retired to his living room. He took his chair, and I took the other one—which must have been his brother’s chair when he was alive and living with Robert. There was a book already there for me, something historical Robert wanted me to see, a detail leftover from our last visit, and we settled with our cocoa into the conversation of the day.

Robert was born and grew up in Saint John; his family was not wealthy enough to send him to university, but with scholarships he got a few degrees, including one from Cambridge. He taught for more than twenty-five years at UNB, taking care of his brother all the while. Robert was the director of UNB’s creative writing graduate program, served as editor of The Fiddlehead, and, upon his retirement in 1989, was named Professor Emeritus. He might as well have been named Human Emeritus, for all the kindnesses he bestowed to his students and to colleagues over the years.

I often invited Robert to be a featured reader at odd sundays at molly’s, and he was always persuaded to come, gracing the mic with his lovely, quiet demeanor. M. Travis Lane said of Robert Gibbs that: “. . . he usually devotes himself to asserting the value of the ordinary.” She called him “a gourmet of the minimal  . . .  an acknowledged master of the anecdotal poem.”

The Essential Robert Gibbs, published in 2012 by The Porcupine’s Quill, has a wonderful selection of Robert’s poetry, thanks to Brian Bartlett who chose them. I wish I had been one of his students.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

Gibbs, Robert. All This Night Long. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1978.
---. Angels Watch Do Keep. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1997.
---. A Dog in a Dream. New Brunswick Chapbooks 14. Fredericton, NB: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1971.
---. Driving to Our Edge. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 2003.
---. Earth Aches. Fredericton, NB: Wild East, 1991.
---. Earth Charms Heard So Early. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1970.
---. “English Poetry in New Brunswick, 1940–1982.” A Literary and Linguistic History of New Brunswick. Ed. W.R. Gair. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1986. 125-44.
---. I’ve Always Felt Sorry for Decimals. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1978.
---. A Kind of Wakefulness. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973.
---. Kindly Light. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 2007.
---. A Mouth Organ for Angels. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1984.
---. Personal interview. 20 June 2009.
---, ed. Reflections on a Hill Behind a Town: An Anthology of Poems by Founders, Editors and Close Associates of the Fiddlehead to Mark its 35th Anniversary. Spec. issue of The Fiddlehead 125 (1980).
---. The Road From Here. New Brunswick Chapbook 1. Fredericton, NB: New Brunswick Poetry Chapbooks, 1968.
---. A Space to Play In. Toronto, ON: League of Canadian Poets, 1980.
---. “Three Decades and a Bit Under the Elms: A Fragmentary Memoir.” Essays on Canadian Writing 31 (1985): 231-9.
---. The Tongue Still Dances: Poems New and Selected. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books/Goose Lane Editions, 1985.
Gibbs, Robert, and Robert Cockburn, eds. Ninety Seasons: Modern Poets From the Maritimes. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1974.
Nowlan, Alden. Early Poems. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Fredericton, NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1983.
---. An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Toronto, ON: Irwin, 1985.
---. Road Dancers. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1999.
---. White Madness. Ed. Robert Gibbs. Ottawa, ON: Oberon, 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

allison calvern, creator of odd sundays at molly's reading series, once interviewed Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the top floor of City Lights Books in San Francisco.

rob mclennan : Shima, by Shō Yamagushiku

Shima, Shō Yamagushiku
McClelland and Stewart, 2024

Another full-length debut from this spring’s McClelland and Stewart poetry quartet is Victoria, British Columbia-based Shō Yamagushiku’s book-length poem, Shima (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a collection built as a collage-text of memory, witness, family history and scrapbook, detailing, as the press release offers, “the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.” Opening with the prose-set “Shima,” the book collages a quartet of sections—“amerika-yuu,” “yamatu-yuu,” “uchinaa-yuu” and “yanbaru-yuu”—which combine into a long poem comparable to a book such as the late Barry McKinnon’s infamous I Wanted To Say Something (Prince George BC: New Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), which was itself an essential long poem of leaving, collage, family history and recollection. “Uncle,” Yamagushiku writes, “Forgive me for shining this light / into your graveyard of an eye // Where are you?” And a few lines further: “You are being vaulted into currency / carved of timber bones, this relic // that you will become, you thought // you had a choice [.]” Comparable to McKinnon’s long poem, but one might say that Yamagushiku’s narratives stretch out into an abstract as well, offering narrative concreteness across a far wider canvas. Even prior to the first piece, Shima offers a definition of the title: “shima, n. 1. A village; a community. / 2. One’s home village. 3. One’s fief. / 4. An island.” The definition informs, but says little, with the history of this Japanese city buried under the weight of what remains unsaid, but for through Yamagushiku’s lyric. Paired with the opening quote by the late Etel Adnan, from her collection Paris, When It’s Naked (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993)—“An ancestral forest within me stirs my / memory and makes life untenable.”—Yamagushiku frames a collection named for this ancestral city, writing around exile, utilizing family/archival photographs and the endless strands of history. “a vastness // disappears // abandons me,” he writes, early on in the collection, “to a cloudless night // all the stars // turn sleep’s path // away from me [.]” As poet and critic Harold Rhenisch offers as part of his own recent review of the collection, published online at The British Columbia Review:

Shima is a book of the sea from an island village in the Okinawan archipelago, and a portrait of that community from the sea. It is about taking a breath and swimming between them. There is also a forest.

The book rises from the Ryukyuan diaspora. It eventually steps back from the turned shoulders of some of Sho Yamagushiku’s ancestors and goes to sea. Before him, there were the Amas, the free-breathing, deep-diving fisherwomen of Okinawa who have been sustainably harvesting shellfish from their ocean for thousands of years.

Shima is a comprehensive collage-work around colonialism and its multi-generational effects, exile and its obligations, providing a compelling family story across four countries and a century of displaced lineage. “July 6, 1904 – Taro leaves Tanna / on a boat bound for Mexico via / New Caledonia. He works the / coal mines as a contract labourer / for La Compañia Japonesa Mexi- / cana de Comercio y Colonización / in Coahuila, Mexico. Taro flees / from the mine’s exploitative / labour conditions with a group / of Okinawan workers across the / border into the United States. / His daughter’s son fathers me.” The text offers echoes, repetitions along threads of fragments held with emotional and lyrical heft, composing a kind of reclamation across these strands of history and loss, from their original displacement to Japanese internment, of soldiers and occupiers, and a refusal to forget family bonds, and origins. This collection is multi-layered and complex, and as subtle as it is powerful, composing a stunning work of empathy and history across the form of the long poem. The collection begins with a six-stanza prose poem that provides the opening salvo of a bookended image of quiet intimacies: the narrator’s father, pulling the narrator’s hair. As the piece opens:

My father stands in his yard holding my hair. Down the sloping crescent, a tangle of strands fastens me to a rainbow. The border dissolves at my feet, feet break, and we disappear. I am far away now, blistering. My father is still holding. Each month away from that ledge gathers in my scalp, drying into dust.

Every evening my father plucks my hair. A cloud of disturbed thoughts darken the sky, bats flying from the recesses. With the hair on my scalp my father finds a rhythm. A love so stretched, without a limit, I feel as though I might bleed.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a trilogy of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He is reading in Toronto on Wednesday, but you probably already know that.

Jérôme Melançon : Continent, by Aaron Boothby

Continent, Aaron Boothby
McClelland & Stewart, 2023

 

 

 

 

Among those who are concerned about the ongoing harms of colonialism and genocide, a rule of composition is emerging. We must position ourselves within our texts; point to beginnings and structures that go far beyond the words we are about to share; and then inhabit our words with an understanding of how our bodies are touched and targeted or protected, in contrast to the lived experiences of others.

Aaron Boothby follows this rule in his collection Continent: he positions himself in relation to his family and ancestry, through his body, through his personal origin and history, and the movements across countries, and within as well as against the country, all amid the facts of colonialism, racism, exclusion, and genocide. As in all grand, new, patient writing, the rule disappears within the writing, carries it and supports it. It gives it character – think of massive exposed beams, logs, or poles, with traces of their past lives showing, as they support new life.

Boothby adds forms of his own to this rule. Within each section, a semi-regular form appears, cloud-like or in cloud formations, always wth some variations through blank spaces and pauses, without titles. Neither linear nor non-linear, these arrangements give us fragments of speech, interruptions, jumps – and the knowledge that there is more at the angles or behind each element than we can see from our vantage point.

Taken as a whole, and in each poem, Continent is a meditation on being a settler and on taking on an anticolonial stance and existence. It would be unfair to this meditation to comment on a single poem by itself, since the collection is held together by the oppositions and contrasts between the experiences on which the poems reflect. Each poem offers glimpses into what the others let us imagine without unveiling.

An example of this interrelatedness of poems can be found in one that recounts the discovery of unmarked graves at residential school sites (page 24) and in another that describes the blockades that Indigenous groups had been building in order to stop different colonial projects (page 27). In the first, we read “What’s name without place to be held” and “What’s name // when one is not held,” alongside a deploration that people have become “anomalies,” “aberrations.” In the second, he creates an arresting impact through a caesura that reproduces the work of the barricade: “they said with their flesh you do not // have permission.”

In these poems Boothby does not hesitate to place himself where the country places him. In this second poem, he places himself within the group represented by the government and opposed by the blockade: “We said we do / We said words like critical infrastructure.” And with this last line, we can see the work that well placed ambiguity can accomplish, showing here that words of negation become like critical infrastructure in the functioning of the settler state.

In this careful position, Boothby also displays his sensitivity to history and its repetition, tying the blockades of the moment to those of the Kanesatake Resistance, when “we threatened children.” In the first poem, he maintains a different form of distance with the people whose graves had been located and numbered, only indirectly referring to Cowessess First Nation and Kapawe’no First Nation through the numbers they announced. At the same time, he measures what he knows and mostly does not know about them, carrying enormous emotion through a great economy of words. In a similar fashion, he ends the second poem with what could be read as a utopian perspective of reconciliation, but which I read as a recognition of settler responsibility, since the “we” of the book is the settler “we” rather than the “we” of Indigenous and non-Indigenous togetherness:

     If we are fragmented we still have common ties
no matter anguish      our legal bonds         our claims

These two poems offer but one example of the parallels that are created throughout this book. These are not mirrors, but continuities and refusals of realities that exist side by side. Within poems and across the collection, grand and powerful speech coexists with small, pointed questions; compare:

We who break earths in thresholds (32)
what does a map of our presence look like (48)

Through these poems Boothby explores the problem of saying “we,” the difficulties of being claimed by a country and favoured by its repressive institutions (the police is omnipresent in the collection, but wholly unconcerned with his speaker and turned toward Black bodies and queer bodies, who also resist it). His phrasing of “we” and reversals of expectations suggest a path to the recognition of collective responsibility that does not entail solidarity or support for the group as a whole – indeed, where “we” becomes a “curse” (26):

     We called this our own country       we were
herald of ruin    Who did we think would stop us (23)

The myths that support the continuation of colonial, liberal Canada are a frequent target of the often direct, concrete critique that runs through the poems. “I have questions about Paradise,” we read, twice, and find that “Our myths are nightmares     laws / their maintenance” (51).

Yet critique is not the central element in this collection. Boothby’s poems offer us ways to situate ourselves as well as ways to move differently, especially in their reflection on the relation of language to land, water, and sky.

These elements – these bearers of life – undo our language, and so undo our current relationship to them. By seeking a closer relationship to water and land, Boothby finds both transformation and lack of pre-existing profound relation: while “Water’s touches unsentence land” (26), he finds “what’s capitalized null in meadows” (59). He also connects to a different language that emerges from the land, water, and sky – not only in non-urban spaces, but within the city, or as city. He attempts to hear this language, to hear what things call themselves. He lets himself be taken away by the “syntax undertow” (60), to join his voice to a different choral than the Canadian settler “we.” The finality of this attention of the relation of language to land is practical and existential at once: “Could I learn perhaps to be gusted // to be guest” (65) – a possibility without an interrogation.

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.

Ben Robinson : One Question for Laurie D. Graham

 

 

 

 

 

BR: I’d like to ask you about your author bio, which, is maybe generally a rude thing to do, after having read an entire book, to just ask one question about what tends to be a pretty standardized form appended to the “real” text, but here I think your bio is more related to the content of the book than usual. In the bio you list, where both your maternal and paternal families emigrated from and where they were based in Canada upon their arrival, along with an estimate of how long your family history in this place extends. I’m wondering if you can first say a bit about the process of uncovering this familial information, second, what function this information serves in your bio and last, how that familial knowledge then shaped the poem — was it, as you say in your excellent newsletter crop samples, “scaffolding” for the “scant words [you] wrote in reply” or are those family histories present in the poem in a more tangible way?

 

Thanks for this question, Ben! I’ve more or less known since early on where my four pairs of great-grandparents emigrated from in the early 1900s; I recall being a child and reciting the countries to myself and others, reinforcing personal lore given to me by my parents and grandparents. The book I’m working on now involves learning more about the specifics—moving from reciting rote facts to carrying something of the story (and the silences): the circumstances of my forebears’ arrival on this continent, what they left, why they left, and how their arrival forms part of Canada’s colonizing project. It’s tougher than it might seem. There are many erasures, and attempts at erasure.

I can definitely see how saying where I come from and what landed me here—alongside what treaty territory I grew up in and whose land I now reside on—lends context to Fast Commute, helps ground the reader in a poem that’s in near-constant motion: if you know something about who I am and where I come from, you now know helpful things about voice, subject, even use of language or why certain metaphors are chosen or certain images evoked.  My bio might also give the reader some understanding about why this book, as well as in my last book, Settler Education, is so pre-occupied with drawing connections between the Prairies and southern Ontario—that this comes from a place of personal in addition to historical examination. I think I understood such disclosure as a responsibility, and a courtesy, and I really like that you saw this refracting through and speaking to and of the poem, that a bio could have a deeper function. And I think you got it right on to point out how Fast Commute is offering scant words in reply; in fact, I think that might be what all my books are trying to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education, was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Laurie’s maternal family comes from around Derwent, Alberta, by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from around Semans, Saskatchewan, by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.