I have always bitten off little chunks of my life, like pieces of thread and sold them to whatever journal, magazine or anthology was handy at the time. Some have been songs. On these pages I’m going to try and get some of them together as well as promote the latest work. Currently it is a memoir called, A Story Of Salterton.

A few months from now I hope to have a video of ‘Salterton’ you can walk through, in case you can’t come to visit. It is a real place in the world, as real to me as it was to Robertson Davies who invented all the names for the places we will visit in the book and soon, here on the web.

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“Does it cohere? Is it credible?” The British poet, Michael Glover tells us to question the poem we are making in a workshop he gave on a humid Monday afternoon here in this small Canadian prison town, of Kingston, Ontario.a

With his wife, the artist, Ruth Dupre, Glover spoke about the “pure act of fabrication, made of bits of this and that.” His new book, from San Marco Press, a sixth collection of poems, ‘For The Sheer Hell of Living,‘ lay on the table, all 94 pages of it. But he quotes W.H. Auden’s:”Poetry exists in the valley of its making - it makes nothing happen.” He approves of love poetry; “Poetry depends on it for survival.”

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I favor sitting in the old chairs
by my front door when the guitar
and the sun is out
wind not strong enough
to pick the poppy petals,
neighbours mellow and not
panhandling. it helps to have
a hound around, lying out so flat
someone swears he’s dead but
for the twitch and snuffle.

The old stuff starts like a teapot
set to whistle; lonelies first, all the
memories, might’ve beens, then mountain
and cotton field songs which always
lead into Jesus. After that a bunch of road songs
some of them the blues and as much
part of me as my toes and whiskers,
singing till the words stick in the wind
like strawberry jam in a beard, till it blows
like Dylan, high and outside while dusk
settles in around us like a good old quilt
being shook out and sleep starts calling
for someone to lie down and get comfy.

Even if it’s just regular hurting, something
you can’t yet make out, or even death’s
drab daughter, I’m inclined to get someone
with any sort of voice at all
to come help me find the song.

I never have a rock without a roll
Tunes just chew and swallow me up whole
And so I play them not, a silent soul
Sitting while the quiet takes its toll
On my gnarly knotted music shhing knoll

Science has proved that everything in nature has a voice, a distinct sound of its own, it actually speaks if we could only learn the language, as Dr Dolittle pleads, though in the books he was a short, chubby bald guy who would be amazed to see that woman-hating Rex Harrison in the movie role. In actuality, the author of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, WAS a short chubby bald guy who write the books as letters home to his son while he served in the trenches in W W I (and made it back). How popular culture overwhelms our best work. Rose

(for John)

You’ve got to admire those dead flies

Hanging from the sticky strip

In the far from model kitchen

At least they felt passion,

died in the throes of it,

disappointing spider Sunday dinner

not gone for nothing

but wild with desire

not hunted down,

life fluid sucked slowly

till just dry husk remains,

strapped to nursing home bed.

No more choice.

Decisions have sharp edges,

necessary risk. Weigh the odds.

What do the bookmakers say?

Abandon yourself then,

Glorious, all the mouth sputtering

explosive words; with gusto

chutzpah, pizzazz, tah dah!

Deliver yourself into the arms

of what could be the last love.

Message hanging

till broom or bulldozer.

Swinging in the air

From the sticky strip.

Mother Time, Joanne Arnott’s sixth book, is as strong on the time as it is on the mothering. (Ronsdale Press, 2007, 139pp, ISBN 978-155380-046-0). ‘Enchantment & Freedom,’ for example:

‘When did the chant begin? How many generations or thousands of years, shaken in the womb to the same damn rhythm…”

Measuring, (“today I have been a good mother…”) releasing, (“wandering off without us”) returning (“an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time).

 Arnott introduces us to words for the questions we’ve been born with. Even her sections are timed, bearing the dates, where she was when she wrote, starting with the mid-eighties for Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, that now notorious part of Canada. Arnott’s poems give us the work of the world; birthing and rearing, then on to Unmaking the House which made me wish Susannah Moody could’ve had this book as a long winter read: “gather your children, sweep out the house, leave the broom at the threshold and fly.”

The title poem, Mother Time, brilliantly weaves both themes, along with Arnott’s mixed heritage: “sweetgrass hair moss eyes matriarch of clan bends berries folds dried leaf.”

We follow her lead, echo her mind, bodies tracing patterns she enacts, protocol running thick, then thin then thick again, through millennial time.

Small changes weave the old into the new again, braiding youth, maturity, great age, cycling seasons. Now it is fish. Nnow it is digging sticks and roots. Now it is fruit. Now it is home repair and the snowbound truth; dress for a small child, feast for a clan, dancing slippers. tea for a treacherous cough, song for a broken heart, laughter.

She can make each of these things at the proper time, given community, a perceived need and an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time.”

Oh Inukshuks they have no knees, no knees

Yet they do as they very well please. Oh please

They cannot ride a bike

Though Inukshuk can hike

Like the rates of Olympic park fees

Inukshuks are made out of rocks, they rock

On their flat feet you never see socks, no sock,

Sometimes they may stir

It will rarely occur

But when outraged, Inukshuk could walk

John Barlow knows one on the beach, a peach

Its head is too tall to reach, no reach

He’d like to have poets

Read there and they know it

An Inukshuk PO-etic niche!

Behind one Inukshuk is me, oh me

And maybe another from you, (or he)

These rocks they are old

Never plastic, not sold

Make your own for Inukshuk are free!

Rose

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW?

What went on behind the scenes of the old bookshop?

Why did the police bring up the bodies at dinner?

When were the newspaper headlines accurate?

Where was the bishop when it started?

How did the burglar break in?

Who knows the secrets?

A Story Of Salterton is the memoir I have finally finished. Below are all 36 chapters with short descriptions of their content. Think of it as James Herriot’s vet stories only this time with felons, felon wannabes, old books and family. Let me know what you think.

LIST OF EXCITING CHAPTERS (You won’t want to miss a single one) -

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Sharp-beaked starlings dig the dirty drifts, searching for scraps. Flock
has rhythm, moving together, peek hop peck hop poke hop chitter hop
chatter, hoarde of small vacuums attacking the undersides of sofa
cushions, diving for loose change. Splayed tracks in the snow pattern
the shadows. Swing from the housevine, decorate bare branches like
temporary leaves as their birdfathers did before them. The arrangement
of black bird bodies on stark limbs are music notes, treble cleft
tangled below. The evershifting songs composed like this with the tree,
from moment to moment, accompany the wind in her rounds, echo the being
of birds.

If you think that much-reprinted classic, Leaven of Malice, knocked the socks off the literary establishment, then you are going to clasp Salterton to your bosom! Like that old country song about following your man from job to job, Salterton is Rose DeShaw’s account of stumbling over horror in the mundane as she mistakenly plans a quiet, normal, life of work and raising a family, while her husband pursues an academic career. Would she have followed, if she knew his goal was prison?

How do you deal with running an official hostel for teenage runaways across Canada without any training? Where do you go to learn the antiquarian book business? Can such a bookseller survive in the marketplace? What made her take this book training into prison? Will the beatings, stabbings, hangings and beheadings behind bars, change her family life forever? Why would she, church-trained and obedient, ever join a picket line around a prominent cathedral? How would this change everything, forever?

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