In
her valuable and concise preface the author, Carolyne Van Der Meer, advises us
that “The word ‘journeyman’ refers to an individual who has completed an
apprenticeship and has been fully trained in a trade—but who is not yet a
master.”
Her “journeywoman” then is about the journey made by one woman and by
many women, through childhood, womanhood and motherhood, towards mastery,
enlightenment, maturity. The fifty poems which comprise this collection, Journeywoman, are snapshots taken on
that journey.
The
volume is divided into four sections of unequal length. The first section is
one of the longest. Manoeuvring is an unexpectedly delightful title for
the section which deals with relationships; with mother, with husband, with
son, with others.
Van Der Meer excels at titles and the first poem is entitled (S)mothering which is a poem in itself.
This poem sets the tone for the rest of the collection, with its deceptively
simple language, the use of unexpected commonplace phrases, the questioning of
herself and of others, and the responses. It ranges over three generations,
author, her mother, her child. “So who is real? / the ones we are, / have
created, the ones who reappear”
I
like how we are gently invited to consider mundane common tasks and ponder possible
deeper meanings without any sledgehammer language, any obtrusive signposts of
the significant. Consider how in The
Sewing Box the replacing of a broken button on a husband’s jacket cuff
becomes such an important event and leads to such wonderful details and
memories. And see how the repeated,
almost off-hand, phrase, “No one will notice”, becomes so important at the end.
Similarly
in Folding the Sheets the details of
the process become a sort of advance and retreat country dance which ends with
the wonderfully evocative, “fold it crisply / into a perfect square”. We are left to imagine the identity of
the other person, the precise relationship.
Van
Der Meer is good at knowing how much to tell us and how much trust to put in
the reader. She is also good at including detailed descriptions, fooling us
sometimes into thinking she is telling us everything. In Windows, Lesson at Masala
Cooking School and in Homemade Pasta
on New Year’s Eve for instance the
great accretion of details still leaves central questions of relationships open
to the reader’s probing.
The
second section Travelogue is the
longest and there are accounts of incidents and thoughts arising from trips to
Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain. There are poems which involve literary
figures, Oscar Wilde’s stature in Galway and grave in Paris, the Brontes in
Yorkshire and in County Down, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Calderón de la Barca,
Lope de Vega, the portraits of writers in stained glass at the National
Library, Dublin, and even Jim Morrison.
Anyone who visited Yeats’ isolated
County Galway tower can appreciate that first line of Visiting Yeats at Thoor Ballylee, “It was as though the world had
stopped”.
But
the most impressive poems in this section may be the more personal ones, Buying Sandals in Oltrarno, where she
gets herself “a pair of handmade / Roman sandals, the kind / in the children’s
Bibles / her mother used to read”, and Leather
Shop in the Via Francesco Crispi, where
boots or shoes are purchased, “I settle on / burnt sienna you on lime green”.
As elsewhere in the collection a raft of details are included but the reader is
left to figure out exactly the relationship of the couple or the significance
of the incidence.
Have
those solid Irish midland towns, Mullingar and Athlone, ever before figured at
the start and ending of a poem? I doubt it. In Atonement the enigmatic journey begins “By Mullingar, we were
through the worst of it” and ends “you took the exit for Athlone / before I
could tell you / where to go”. The hint of “alone” in Athlone is great.
Section
three’s stark title, The Cancer Journey,
points to a different, traumatic journey. These six poems are a multi-layered
meditation of the treatment journey, the drugs and medication, the fear of
relapse, a fellow-traveller who did not survive and the scars left behind by
the disease and the treatment.
The
first poem in this sequence, ABVD, deals
directly with the 4-drug combination used in the chemotherapy treatment by
naming each of the drugs and meditating at length upon it, its name, origins,
history, effects on the body.
“Vinblastine
sin blasts me / my silent joke, never spoken / another colourless poison / first
isolated by men called Noble and Beer / names unlike their protégé, found / in
a Madagascar periwinkle plant / so pretty and exotic / so nasty and toxic”.
There
is no sugar coating here, no poetic softening of the reality. The poem ends with
a simple plea: “ABVD me / back to life”.
The
final section of eight poems entitled Fellow
Travellers has poems about women, some named, some well-known, others not
well-known, some anonymous. These include Emily Bronte, Saint Agnes and Lady
Bathe who is interred with her husband, Sir Lucas Dillon in Trim, Ireland in a
tomb known as “The Tomb of the Jealous Man and Woman”.
There
are two poems in this section concerning the issue of Muslims in Canada,
particularly Quebec, with reference to the Reasonable Accommodation debate. The
first, The Philosophy of Hijab is in
the voice of a Muslim female and the second, Prayer on a Train, describes an encounter with a Muslim originally
from Iraq, who prays on a train. It ends with a thought: “I realize she is more
/ sure, praying on a train / in a foreign land / than so many of us at home”.
The
collection ends with a four-section meditation on the nun, Jeanne Le Ber,
described as North America’s First Recluse who lived in Ville-Marie which later
became Montreal. This was as a result of the poet’s retreat in the convent in
which the recluse had lived. The silence, the meditation has such an effect on
the poet that in the last stanza the poet and the recluse have become one and
the ending could apply both to the art and craft work of Jeanne and to the work
of the poet: “God willing the images I stitch / will stay”.
So
Carolyne Van der Meer’s Journeywoman
ends where all journeys end, with the hope that something will remain, some
scrap of memory or image or writing to outlast the life.
The
book is beautifully produced and edited by the Canadian publishing house, Inanna,
whose mission is to publish a multiplicity of voices, particularly fresh new
Canadian voices, that speak to the heart and tell truths about the lives of the
broad spectrum and endless diversity of Canadian women. This volume certainly
fulfils that promise.
The
cover is especially striking and features a specially created painting by the Montreal
artist, Ariane Côté, also entitled Journeywoman.
Journeywoman
can be purchased on the Inanna website here: https://www.inanna.ca/index.php/catalog/journeywoman/
or
on Amazon here:
Well
done to all concerned.
Michael
Farry
March 2018