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Winnipeg Free Press
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Stanzas for SPRING
This year's National Poetry Month marks the 10th anniversary of Writes of Spring, an annual gathering of poems edited by Ariel Gordon and, this year, Charlene Diehl, director of Plume Winnipeg. Of the 500-plus poems submitted, Gordon and Diehl selected 13 from established and emerging Winnipeg poets, including Rosanna Deerchild, the only returning writer of the group, Marjorie Poor, Spenser Smith and others, which can be found in the 49.8 section of today's Free Press. (Pages F2 through F4 in the print edition.) A reading to launch and celebrate these poems will take place at McNally Robinson Booksellers' Grant Park location at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Re:Wild Her ● ● ● Rewilding, an intervention into the natural world to restore ecosystems, is the structuring conceit in Shannon Webb-Campbell's latest collection, Re:Wild Her (Book*Hug, 112 pages, $23). These poems follow the speaker from Iceland to France to California through art, tarot and deep time, gathering tenderness and claiming pleasure and expansiveness. The collection is propelled by a subtle, incantatory rhythm that evokes the ebb and flow of the tide: 'Water rushes over cracked earth/ you retrace tides through clay/ grounding mud with reversing rhythms/ (… .)// what flows in/ must flow out.' In How Do I Reach for the Wild/ (Three Graces), Webb-Campbell uses the life cycle of a girl, woman, crone to trace a process of reclaiming a self that's been worn away. The poem moves from a position of alienation from the world and the self — 'how do I reach for the wild?/ circle the womb/ how can I grasp the wind?/ motherlines ring a cosmic spin' — toward reconnection: 'become a fish-woman/ emerge from the water's offering/ after a trinity of swims all in one day/ baptism by sea.' Buy on Myth ● ● ● Terese Mason Pierre's much-anticipated debut, Myth (House of Anansi, 120 pages, $23), is a startling, transformative collection. Using a series of speculative logics and images, Pierre transcends the boundaries between earth, ocean and cosmos and past and future. In Momentum, the speaker considers the conditions of belongingness: 'My family takes a second helping of love —/ my father, from the church parking lot.' From this opening, Pierre weaves images that create friction between the speaker's family and true belonging before she invokes a myth to change the story: 'I draft// a new mythology, of sand and shells/ and touching every other creature// that has breathed an air of full faith/ beyond a warped chain —// a taught beld, the scuttling of crabs/ underfoot, the rising tithes.' Here, Pierre's intricate use of line and language shine. She ties this new mythology of water and interconnection to the opening image of the church parking lot with 'the rising tithes,' which at the same time calls back the strictures of religious rules — and, with its phrasing and near-rhyme, evokes the ocean. These poems enact a myriad of small and monumental shifts away from disconnection and injustice into a web of belonging and justice. In Aliens Visit the Islands, Pierre envisions a possible future that centres and celebrates Black people, as well as an ideal model of cultural exchange: 'they give us teleportation (the key is to ignore/ philosophy when you push the button) and we/ give them white sand, yellow roti, a container/ of sorrel.' While the background of this poem is the meeting of two cultures, the poem ends with a several-lines-long meditation on grief and longing, which is rooted in the Aliens' physical difficulty inhabiting the world: 'When they leave, they promise/ to tell their people Earth was warm, was Black,/ and cradles its pain in the sea.' Unmet Buy on ● ● ● In Unmet (Biblioasis, 124 pages, $22), stephanie roberts uses surrealism and ekphrastic poems to explore the way one's imagination shapes one's experience of the world. The poems in this collection demonstrate a vivid use of image and a versatile use of line and technique. In the first of four poems titled Unmet, roberts conjures Marilyn Monroe as a child, who 'during services (…) sat/ on her hands, bit her lip, & for a minute,/ forced a smaller self against the world.' Here, the past and the spiritual world are made concrete with a visceral bodily sensation, of an addressee for whom 'silence stiffens your neck,' of a girl whose adult self will become iconic forcing 'a smaller self against the world.' In Einige Kreise (Several Circles), an ekphrastic poem responding to Wassily Kandinsky's painting of the same title, roberts explores the relation between viewing a painting and painting it. The poem opens and closes with the same image pattern. In the opening, the speaker imagines cold, and in the closing stanza, after the speaker has moved backward and forward in time, 'the imagination's ouroboros' returns to cold and 'Love waits at the end of line;/ mind seizes line, draws it/ end to end, kisses it to canvas.' Elegy for Opportunity Buy on ● ● ● Natalie Lim's debut, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn, 96 pages, $20), opens with an argument against writing to feed the voyeuristic hunger for trauma: 'what if I'm done with diasporic trauma. done imagining what people want to read,' she writes. What follows is a dynamic collection, lively and moving with curiosity. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. In On Biology, the speaker considers the way the pandemic altered their relation to the world and their bodily experience. Notably, the speaker does not look away from the ways in which they are made helpless in the face of overwhelming conditions: 'gotten bored/ and felt guilty about it, because what a privilege it is/ to be bored instead of desperate or sick. I try to do/ the small things I can, for myself and the world —/ go on walks, sign petitions, take baths, donate./ all of it feels like failure.' The collection is anchored by five elegies for the NASA Opportunity Rover. In the last of these, which closes the collection, 'things are bad right now./ really bad.// the world feels unrepairable.' Here, the short, end-stopped lines weigh the poem down — for good reason, because, as in On Biology, the problems Lim faces aren't solvable with individual action, whatever good intentions fuel them: 'unchecked greed and exploitation./ heat domes and cold snaps./ bombs, disease, starvation, genocide —/ 40,000 dead in Gaza.// 40,000.' The strength of these poems lies in their clear-sightedness and their bravery. Time and again, Lim faces devastation in the same way she continues to address the dead rover, the same way she continues to imagine a future, persistently, curiously, lovingly: 'I would love that kid so much,/ like no one has ever loved a kid before,' she says of the question of motherhood, 'and it wouldn't be enough/ but I would try, I would try so hard.' Buy on Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.
Winnipeg Free Press
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Writes of Spring celebrates 10th anniversary with baker's dozen of poetry treats
Welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Writes of Spring! The traditional 10th anniversary present is tin or aluminum. For the last five years, we've published 12 poems. But this year, we splurged and selected 13, as an anniversary present to ourselves! For 2025, we didn't set a theme — as a gift for the poets — and we got 104 submissions. That's the most we've ever received! At five poems per submission, myself and co-editor Charlene Diehl had as many as 500 poems to read. But we had a great time, reading the poems to each other, trying to find the perfect mix of poems and people. Nothing is perfect, but I am so proud of these poems and these poets, together and separately. My thanks to Plume Winnipeg and to the Winnipeg Arts Council, who this year supported the poets's fees. Happy National Poetry Month! Poetry forever! there is a garden where my breast used to be flowers and petals yellows and blues all claim space where desire once lived an explosion of beauty my lover used to say scar tissue now a garden of forget me nots Jaime Laye Bouw lives and writes on Lake Winnipeg. Ava Stokke Sometimes I think of you in the pauses. I can see you standing on a street corner, delicate hands shoved in the pockets of your big brown overcoat, the one your father gave you for Christmas that makes you look like a skyscraper. When you board the bus, you rehearse what you'll say when you get to the party, where you'll stand next to someone I'll never know; laugh at a joke I'll never hear. Some mornings, when I look outside my window, the other houses look like you. Ava Stokke a university student from Winnipeg currently studying law. walk straight mama said keep your head up my girl but there are days when my head bows my body folds into a question mark days when i want to crawl into an ending i remember that story of when mama was a girl sent alone on the trapline she walked straight out of the bush broken but brave i straighten my back find my horizon rise Rosanna Deerchild is Cree from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation. She is the author of three books of poetry — this is a small northern town, calling down the sky, and she falls again — and one play, The Secret to Good Tea. transformed expressions of a father-grandfather spirit last weekend my young daughter wanted to hear my dad speak Ibanag and so she asked him. ____voice changes. tone is different. shoulders soften; ___his whole body unclenches and relaxes __He sits different — _like sinking into a Lazyboy; as breath finds tongue, they instinctively begin a dance; _we hear a new kind of love frequency __coming from the Ibanag ___that slightly shifts ____the vibrato beating of the heart _____that lighter push-off from the diaphragm. ______when tongue softens thickens _______ornamenting air like spun sugar cane. I do not understand any of the words but I know that it feels familiar: closer; like home. T. J. Evangelista is a prairie writer who enjoys learning about different cultures, listening to music, and spending time with her daughter. She studies Peace & Conflict at the University of Manitoba. Denise Cook You shine today You are not lost You have strength __You hold on ____You are not lost You belong ___You always did I knew you had a name I knew I'd know you ______eventually ________Buffalo Woman You are not lost ____Rest in LOVE ______Ashlee ASHLEE Denise Cook is mother of five, a beautiful sandwich of 2 girls, a son, then 2 more girls, her true loves. Gramma (loves that!) to 3 lovey grandsons. (Best love.) North End (from and) to her heart. North End Women's Centre Consequence. People pass, quiet as traffic, by the kitchen window; thank goodness you are in my bed. There's a fellow I know who stirs at 4 to write at 5 until, at 7, his lover awakes with reliable desire and hours pass before their salaries tug them apart. The thought of them taps against me, a cheap blind against a dark window, while you lay sleeping. My bed is our bed. I woke with thoughts loose-limbed and tired; you are curled up, alive and dreaming. Hannah Godfrey (hannah_g) is a British-Canadian writer, artist, and curator. Her practice is informed by curiosity and delight, and recurring themes include home, recollection, queer echo-locating, & myth-making. Marjorie Poor after Sina Queyras's 'There was the moment of the puddle in the path' And the sidewalk is cracked, opening to the world. The sidewalk is treacherous, uneven, malevolent in its intentions to trip you up, send you flying. The sidewalk only pretends to lie flat, passive, placid, but shifts all shifty, loosening bits of concrete to be kicked along. The sidewalk collects dried leaves, twigs, wishes, chips of glass that slice soles open. The sidewalk is imprinted with initials of lovers from when it was wet and new, the heart outline now broken and split. The sidewalk hides all this and more beneath the dark sheen of wide puddles in night rain. Marjorie Poor is an editor and writer in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory. She and Di Harms published a chapbook of centos, Voices [That] Haunt Us, with JackPine Press in 2024. You drive out of the city on a clear winter night and turn off the main highway onto a road untroubled by streetlights, and the land comes out of the dark with its own light. Winter stretches out to a horizon you'd forgotten was there, winter broken here and there by the connect-the-dots of fenceposts, or a blur of bush, or the geometric shape of house or barn. Sky expands and pulls away, lit by multiple stars. (Who knew they are so many? Who knew they shine so bright? Who knew they could be so impossibly close and so remote at once?) And if the moon is big, night is almost day– a ghostly landscape washed in pale blue. The fields flow by, but the sky does not, its huge dome unmoving above you, until the city begins to seem the only place within human dimension. And this is either fear _____________or freedom. Manitoba-born Anne Le Dressay has published three books and two chapbooks of poetry. After 41 years elsewhere, she moved back to Winnipeg in 2020. Jean Chicoine la guerre est au sol, la guerre est dans l'air elle rampe dans les villes, elle se traîne délétère insulte à l'intelligence, bafouement des êtres elle est surtout et avant tout dans nos têtes elle est effet de perspective, elle est injure blasfème, jeu de miroirs, bavant de blessures clamant la paix dans ses dédales de tortures elle est surtout et avant tout dans nos cœurs nous en sommes toustes complices toustes coupables Bachelier en linguistique de l'Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières, Jean Chicoine a quitté le Québec pour le Manitoba en 1989 et vit dans le Village Osborne depuis 1990. Il a écrit toute sa vie, mais n'a publié que sur le tard. This is how it comes into being by leaving winter's signature stillness the sunlight tilting into the center of things. Spring gets inside, stumbling through open windows pulling down glittering icicles, carried by time and warmth toward the earth. The mud tracked across the floor in paw prints so vivid in outline and heft it seems like all wildness is contained there— like something written on a temple wall something about wolves and searching and the bright edges of the living. Dana Medoro is Professor of American Literature at the University of Manitoba. Spenser Smith The Assiniboine is still frozen but soon it will break into a conveyor belt of ice and litter. I will binge-watch this livestream until the melt is complete and I can break out my fishing gear. With a styrofoam box full of worms, I will try to lure little catfish from the riverbed. I imagine they take refuge amongst the shopping carts and mattresses this great city has discarded. No, concerned Wolseley resident, I will not keep anything I catch. I just like how they burp and gurgle, their soft underbellies resting in my hands. Spenser Smith's debut book of poetry, A Brief Relief from Hunger, was published by Gordon Hill Press in 2023. Whispered softly as I pass them Chickweed and honeysuckle Iris, ground ivy, cosmos, poppy, pansy, daisy All the plants have names we have forgotten or never known Speaking them gently on the breeze Anemone, fern, lilac They come forth in colour, lacing the air with fragrance The beginnings of all fruit and all seed Some sweet, some bitter All to be tasted by the earth and the body All to become the bearer of our futures Our stories here to live on Aster, goldenrod, hollyhock Grasses combed by the wind, trees grown tall and deep rooted Marigold, violet, sweet clover, dandelion We will go on to know another life Breathe the same air in different lungs Use all that we have found Demeter-Anemone Willow has been writing since they could write and telling stories for longer. Their work explores themes of nature, isolation, emotion, and longing. Demeter-Anemone Willow (left) with their father, Andrew Vaisius, whose poem follows. It is dark A woman waits for the light to change I see her half a block away no cars coming the street deserted except for her and I pass her It is one of those long side street lights She waits and waits and I wonder if the light is malfunctioning will she still be there in the morning I'll bring her coffee and croissants discuss morning news and last night's concert Meanwhile we'll marry have kids a house with a large bookcase look sharp but finally fall out of grace and divorce The light blinks green and off we go separately in search of another light Andrew Vasius was an Early Childhood Educator for over 30 years as well as being an editor, reviewer and poet. His work appears in five anthologies, over 20 periodicals, four chapbooks (the latest being Inveigh, 2024), and one book, Retirement, published by Flat Singles Press, 2020. Mike DealPhotojournalist Mike Deal started freelancing for the Winnipeg Free Press in 1997. Three years later, he landed a part-time job as a night photo desk editor. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
