Kim Trainor : A small quiet voice in the dark: ecocide and lyric poetry

 

 

 

 

I am mindful that as I write this essay, the boreal is on fire across the prairies; thousands of people have been evacuated; there are fires too in British Columbia, Alberta, northwest Ontario. Last year was our worst wildfire season in recorded history; according to the New York Times, 7,100 wildfires burnt 37 million acres, “an area larger than the size of England.”[1] And this occurs amidst the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction and the on-going breaching of Earth’s planetary boundaries – topics I attempt to write about in my own poetry:

Camped out all day in the foyer of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science as snow falls.
A blank softness. Diffuse light. Drifts of people meet for coffee, then disperse.
I’m reading papers on the shore ice melting at Port Hope, on the tar sands and the toxicity
of the Athabascan river—a landscape resembling a war zone marked
with 200-foot-deep pits and thousands of acres of destroyed boreal forests.
This sticky viscous bitumen. This most destructive project.
The sea ice declines. Inuit elders say, Something has happened—the Earth has tilted
on its axis. The sun sets in a different place. The stars are not where they once were. 

(“Iridium,” A blueprint for survival, Guernica Editions, 2024)

In the face of such existential threat, lyric poetry seems helpless, pointless even, no more than a small quiet voice in the dark. 

Yet increasingly, in the podcasts I listen to, amongst the scientists I read, the ecological activists and theorists I follow, I see often a turn towards poetry, sometimes as symbol, sometimes not, as they call for a frame shift, a different way of seeing, listening, being with and among other humans and more-than-human kin in a complex interdependent web of lives: poetry not as a substitute for various actions and interventions, but as an opening, to hold space for others, for the small quiet voice to be heard. And it is often adjacent to or resonant with Indigenous conceptions such as etuaptmumk (‘2-eyed seeing’)[2] and tsawalk (‘one,’ ‘everything is one’),[3] to longstanding Indigenous epistemologies and practices that are grounded in an intimate knowledge of place.

On New Year’s Day I participated in a S'iwes te Temexw Ceremony at the Blue Heron Nature Reserve in Chilliwack. There was a planting of four young cedar trees, with offerings of salmon to nourish their new life, and then a walk to the Vedder River, where offerings of cedar boughs were made to the waters and the wild salmon. This was followed by a tobacco ties ceremony, as described by the invitation,

“offering our heartfelt, reverent prayers to Mother Earth, and sending our loving kindness, compassion and peace to ripple out into the world.  We will renew our collective commitment to walk softly on Mother Earth and do our part to restore the habitat of fish and wildlife.  Together, we can help transform the world for the greater good, for the wellbeing of current and future generations in honour of our eternal ancestors.”

This peaceful, mindful ceremony has stayed with me all year, meandering, grounding, and I somehow find that I am preoccupied, without any deliberate or conscious intention, with river in my reading. My hope then for this little essay is for it to be an opening of sorts, to hold space for these books and their quiet voices.

I’m returning to the classroom in the fall after two years of service in the faculty union, and re-reading in preparation for this a slim volume I’ve taught before, Rita Wong’s undercurrent. The poem “Unsung Service” is dedicated to Stó:lō, the Fraser River, and begins on the Samson V, a 19^th-century paddle-wheeler turned maritime museum moored on the shores of the Fraser near the College where I work; I walk past it daily, the water chalk-green and brown, stitched with log booms and tugboats, while new luxury condos rise precipitously on its banks. The poem observes how the boat/museum “faces the port where mazdas & audis enter / as raw logs exit, the engine of capitalist ideology attacks the river.” It asks, “what will future earthlings find in the neoliberal middens left behind?” And concludes in the voices of kin, “We are tardigrades and tawny owls, river dolphins and rockhopper penguins, slow sloths and fast elk […] We are your relatives […] We call upon you to remember your ancient oaths, your debts to all realms that enable your existence, your obligations as earth-dwellers.”[4] I will bring my students here, to Stó:lō, and we will write some poems with river.

And we will also read poems by two poets I’ve been in long-distant communication with these past few months, talking about ecopoetry, lichen, rivers, an entangling of ideas and intentions. sophie’s book is a long communion with a river, Conversations with the Kagawong, in which she creates space for river to speak. As she notes in her poem “February 15: The Wind and a Spruce Tree Along the Kagawong River Collaborating on a Text,” “I have been wondering what the Gaagigewang Ziibi might say about herself if she wrote her own plaques and texts.” So she tied a sharpie to a long string attached to a spruce branch to see what Gaagigewang Ziibi might say. I cannot quote the poem that follows, as it is a series of lines scribbled by the wind on a piece of paper placed along the banks of the river. As sophie notes in “September 8,” “I increasingly feel the River watching me. Sometimes I feel she knows when I’m here. Sometimes I feel we listen together. I greet her each time I come.”[5] I felt this sentience and watching presence, although I was a newcomer, on New Year’s Day along the shore of the Vedder as we dropped branches of cedar into the clear waters and said our prayers. As Renée, who first brought the three of us together in conversation, writes, in her poem “Water is,” water is “elemental” and “calls us back to ourselves;” “water at play is water / is the bear splashing salmon / and she the bearer of water.”[6] 

This knowing, that river is elemental, living within us and a living being, a person, is the focus of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? As he describes in the introduction, when he told his 10-year old son the title of his book, his son said, “’Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad … because the answer is yes!’”[7] What any child knows, many of us have long since forgotten. Macfarlane begins by exploring the oddity that water is seen as a commodity, as “liquid asset,” that “it is normalized that a corporation, in the eyes of the law, is an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue—but that a river who has flowed for thousands of years has no rights at all.” His use of the pronoun ‘who’ is one small attempt to nudge us towards Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘grammar of animacy,’[8] an animacy that Rita and Renée and sophie all speak to in the poems I have just described, an animacy lost to the hypercapitalist industrial world that processes all forests, rivers, waters, beings, as resources or standing reserve. Macfarlane discusses the legal movement known as “Rights of Nature,” which first saw some success in Ecuador’s new constitution, ratified on 28 September 2008, that enshrined the rights of Pachamama, water as “‘inalienable, imprescriptible, unseizable and essential for life.’”[9] He describes this Rights of Nature movement as “an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows.” I think of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s report on pathways for legal personhood for the Fraser River Estuary, under threat now as former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault (then Minister for the Environment) and the liberal government under Trudeau gave the green light to the construction of Roberts Bank Terminal 2, a massive extension to the terminal currently there. The Raincoast Conservation Foundation observes that “the estuary, and all the living things it supports, are not viewed as having intrinsic worth. Economic imperatives consistently override the need for ecological protection, and as a result, threaten the very existence of one of the most ecologically important regions in the province.”[10] RB2 threatens a complex web of life, from salmon to resident orcas to biofilm that feeds the western sandpipers and dunlins enroute to breeding grounds in Alaska and the arctic.

Of course, these movements for legal personhood for rivers attempt to bend western legal frames to encompass what cannot be encompassed— Stó:lō is the water that flows bearing silt through shifting banks and channels, the salmon that return each year to spawn and die, the mudflats at the estuary, the diatoms and the biofilm slurped up by the rough tongues of western sandpiper and dunlins who then fly in their shifting murmurations along the Pacific Flyway—migratory routes that span the continents,[11] water that is drawn up into cycles and returns again and again as rain, as fog, as river.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speaks to this in her theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. I attended the Vancouver launch of her book at the St. James Community Square in April, a launch that was held as a conversation between herself and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Nibi—water—she writes, “is interdependent and decentralized, a vessel for multitudes of land- and water-based species and communities.”[12] And nibi “decentres itself: it leaks, moves, flows and reconnects, not as real estate or enclosure or property, but as a living network, linking endless forms of life working with each other to bring about more life, more diversity of life, more abundance of life.” She moves beyond the idea of a western legal framework and asks, “What if, instead, we obliterated the categories of gender and human and rights altogether, and created lateral, co-operative systems of sharing, all in service to bringing forth more life?”

These are some of the small quiet voices I listen for.

 

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/canada-wildfires-2025.html

[2] “Etuaptmumk / Two-eyed Seeing and Beyond.” https://rwok.ca/dialogue-4

[3] E. Richard Atleo, Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (UBC Press, 2007). https://www.ubcpress.ca/tsawalk

[4] Rita Wong, undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). https://nightwoodeditions.com/products/9780889713086?srsltid=AfmBOooKc-sZV1NnVYYRLdi4terDfqEyE64Rxk2OYLc2u7GxEAXeETfd

[5] sophie anne edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talon Books, 2024). https://talonbooks.com/books/conversations-with-the-kagawong-river

[6] Renée M. Sgroi, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions, 2024). https://guernicaeditions.com/products/in-a-tension-of-leaves-and-binding?srsltid=AfmBOopm2j7Z-cBmfLeI6hBqbQbe6pqQtxfSqR4M5w4MUP5VIUQT46QS

[7] Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/724830/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane/9781039007956

[8] https://orionmagazine.org/article/robin-wall-kimmerer-language-animacy/

[9] https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Ecuador_2021

[10] Pasternak and Walters, “Rights of Nature.” https://www.raincoast.org/reports/fraser-personhood/

[11] https://bcbirdtrail.ca/field-notes/birding-202-pacific-flyway/

[12] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/742373/theory-of-water-by-leanne-betasamosake-simpson/9781039010246

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A blueprint for survival appeared with Guernica Editions in 2024. Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) as well as in Athens, Dublin, New Zealand, Copenhagen, Seattle, and elsewhere. Kim’s most recent project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC at the mouth of the Sto:lo (Fraser) River, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. She will also be a featured reader at "Poetry by the River: Environmental Stewardship through the Arts," taking place this month in London, Ontario, which will begin with a river cleanup at the Forks of Deshkan Ziibi/the Thames. Her next book, Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form appears with Oskana Poetry and Poetics (University of Regina Press) in February 2026.  She lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.

 

 

Kim Fahner : Conversations with the Kagawong River, by sophie anne edwards

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

sophie anne edwards : leavings : returns

 from Report from the Siklosi Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

 

samarae from the ash trees around my house and along the access road flutter to the ground throughout the fall and early winter. an ash produces seed every five to seven years, or when it is diseased. i collect and label the seed from six different trees to send to the national seed bank. pecking the seed from the samara, a flock of pine siskins feed from the trees over the month of january. this particular ash, from which i collect these samarae, has a wide split along one side of its trunk, and is hollow on the other. it will be felled in march, when the weather warms. the treescape will change with this loss. soon the emerald ash borer will make its way here. the canopy will change, the food source, shade and shelter of these towering, broad limbed trees will be gone. a loss inextricably connected to globalization, and the pallets of consumerism. i think of Kate’s Sikloski’s work, leavings, and what we leave behind. the traces of our hands. the hope, perhaps futile, in a gentle practice of returns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sophie anne edwards (she/her/settler) is an environmental artist/geopoet based on Manitoulin Island (Mnidoo Mnising, Anishinaabeg Territory). She works with and through text, textile, drawing, and natural materials, often engaged with site-specific and installation practices, to explore the intersections of language, gender, colonization, and environment. Her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and has appeared in Room Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and The Capilano Review among others. Gap Riot Press and Blasted Tree Press have published, respectively, a chapbook and videopoems, and a series of visual poem postcards. She was long-listed for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize; and has attended residencies at the Purdy A-Frame, Banff and Sage Hill. Having finished her first full-length book of ephemeral and site-specific poetry ‘Interview with a river’, she is working on two new projects with funding from the Canada Council.