Review of Mother Time

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.”