Melanie Marttila : My Mother Joins the Resistance, by Richard Harrison

My Mother Joins the Resistance, Richard Harrison
Wolsak & Wynn, 2026

 

 

 

Richard Harrison’s My Mother Joins the Resistance is a meditation on love and life and death and grief. Through the poems in this collection, Harrison processes his mother’s life and the death by medical assistance in dying (MAID), which she chose as an alternative to terminal lung cancer in 2017, and to which Harrison and his brother were witnesses.

In the 12 days leading up to her death, Harrison and his brother took care of their mother and talked with her continually. She partook of “Twelve Last Suppers” growing stronger in her last days of life:

“having lived on the most meagre of meals for years

to keep her body thin and cancer-free,

and the irony of it was, it was the inoperable cancer

that came on anyway that let her find again

a child’s innocence with food.”

And,

“[i]n the garden where we fattened the sparrows,

she set down the final version of her life,

story by story,

until she was satisfied its meaning was clear.”

In his introduction, Harrison offers two paragraphs titled simply 1939 and 2017. In 1939, Doreen Howard was one of the children packed off to the British countryside in Operation Pied Piper, which was famously fictionalized in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In 2017, Harrison and his brother shared those final 12 days with their mother.

The first few poems speak of observation, of family and memory and love, of the excavation of the past and how we see our lost loved ones everywhere, in a “fragment of tusk”, “a small, dried hand”. These poems frame the work of the collection.

Harrison then turns that lens on “A Photograph of Doreen Elizabeth Howard, Six Years Old, in 1934” in which he

“… find[s] that face that was yours before

that man used you as if you had no being of your own.

But in your final minute in a hospital bed

I saw her face return to yours

and look on life again, at last,

weightless and without sorrow.”

 

Doreen was a long-distance swimmer who “trained to take on the Channel”, despised Churchill, the hero of WWII, who subsequently “sent bayonets against picket lines / and the working class she was born to”.

Unable to find a home in America which upheld the myth of Churchill, she moved to Canada with its then socialist leanings, met and married Ralph Harrison, himself fresh out of the British army.

She had also been betrayed and abused by the person who was supposed to be her caregiver during Operation Pied Piper. She was institutionalized when Harrison was nine, having held the secret of her abuse too long. Afterward, “for years she kept trying to make us understand / the ache she could not ease by telling the truth alone.”

In the end, Doreen was a woman who announced, smiling, “I’ll be dead by the end of the week” to a young teller at the bank. Having signed her MAID agreement days before, she’s there to pass on to her son “the treasure and secrets / of her material life” contained in her safety deposit box. She was a woman who recited poems memorized in her youth but never spoken until she was on the road to her chosen death.

There are also family dogs, superheroes, Father (and Father’s ghost), brother, gardening, nature, archaeology, the pandemic, Saint Peter, and poems for family and the doctor who administered the final injection.

In the title poem, Doreen, waiting for the doctor who will deliver her death, declares of hurricane Cindy, “When it pours down on the White House, that’s me pissing on Trump!” What a glorious woman!

The whole collection delivers surprising hope and humour out of the darkest events. I adored every page.

 

 

 

 

Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Ethan Vilu : 25: Hockey Poems New & Revised, by Richard Harrison

25: Hockey Poems New & Revised, Richard Harrison
Wolsak and Wynn, 2019

 

 

 

It is simple and perhaps a little obvious to note that, in relation to its emblematic status in the national imagination, the subject of hockey takes up extraordinarily little space in contemporary Canadian poetry. There are many potential reasons for this: one could, for example, suggest that hockey’s central status in the dominant culture of this country could make it an unappealing subject for poets who may (rightly) want to call that same cultural hegemony into question. A more straightforward explanation, however, is that it simply has to do with the kinds of people poets are likely to be – not just poets, in fact, but all of those who consider an appreciation for poetry to be any kind of conscious factor in their identity. It is a specific group of people who form the conventional audience for poetic writing in Canada, and as a subculture they are perhaps less enthused about hockey (and sports more broadly) than other groups might be.

Indeed, in the introduction to 25: Hockey Poems New & Revised, Richard Harrison makes note of this phenomenon even as he sets about to refute it. He talks about the hesitancy and shyness with which he brought an early manuscript of Hero of the Play, arguably the seminal work of Canadian hockey poetry, to his publisher. Then, as now, there was doubt as to whether all of this made sense as a use of the poetic impulse. The work was published in 1994 and has been in print ever since – a truly legendary feat within the context of Canadian books of poetry. It can be seen, then, as a testament to the nebulous but very real similarities between sport and poetics, and to a widespread desire for poems which honor those connections.

Of course, it is not just any poems that are sought after, but good ones, ones which take the complex, opaque and all-powerful realities of the game and make them legible on the page. Harrison has an immaculate track record of writing these sorts of poems, and this new collection is a stellar representation of that talent. His style – solemn, meticulously unpretentious, and invariably accented with prose sensibilities – is exquisitely suited to the subject matter. Just as with his other works, one of Harrison’s greatest strengths in 25 is his profound, invested vulnerability. There are poems here (Love and the Hockey Pool jumps fervently to mind, as well as Saddledome: After the Flood) which are remarkable, even shocking in their rumination on their embarrassing (but so thoroughly human!) psychological phenomena. Virtually every poem in this book is a demonstration of Harrison’s mastery of the form, and of his insight into the workings of his own deeply held passion.

Naturally, as with any text of this nature, not every sentiment expressed is going to click on all cylinders. It is hard to read his treatment of disgraced former hockey commentator Don Cherry in Coach’s Corner, for example, as anything more than a convoluted excuse made for someone whom the author knows does not deserve it. In a broader sense, Harrison’s treatment of both historical and current inequities in the sport of hockey (for example in The Feminine Redux) can in many ways be seen as unsatisfying. Again, however, one must commend the unvarnished vulnerability in the work, and the author’s willingness to write candidly from his own imperfect perspective. Without in any way holding back criticism where it is due, one must still contend with the raw, alchemical insight which so often occurs in 25, as well as with the technical ability with which it is so aptly expressed.

It is a curious and perhaps counterintuitive reality that there is so little recent poetic writing about hockey coming from the Canadian literary community. What Richard Harrison demonstrates with his most recent work is both the difficulty and risk as well as the wonderful possibilities which are inherent in such subject matter. We can be thankful that Hero of the Play did end up making it to the shelves, and we can continue to engage with the hockey poem as a fascinating part of our literary culture. There is much to be uncovered, and there are many more impactful connections to be made.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu hails from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the managing editor for NōD Magazine, they are the current circulation manager for filling Station.