A hopeful and poetic view of southern Ontario
Review of "Poetry in Place."
Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion
Deborah Bowen (editor) and
Noah Van Brenk (assistant editor)
Guernica Editions, 2025.
Poetry in Place is a collection of attention.
This anthology, edited by Deborah Bowen and Noah Van Brenk, brings together a wide diversity of poetic voices, each reflecting on their experiences of one small region of Southern Ontario. Imagined as “the land between the waters,” this area between Lake Ontario and the Grand River, west of Toronto and east of London, acts as a lens through which the writers consider the wider environmental questions of colonialism, capitalism and climate change. Or as the writer Eudora Welty put it: “one place understood helps us understand all places better.”
I found familiar voices in these pages: John Terpstra, Tanis MacDonald, Catherine Graham, Gary Barwin – and encountered new-to-me poets, too, like Alyssa M. General, Greg Kennedy and Janice Jo Lee. More than 40 poets are included here: writers at different stages of their careers and from all walks of life – immigrants, settlers and Indigenous writers – and their work ranges from protest song to private witness. The breadth of experience expressed is vivid and compelling.
The collection opens with Elizabeth Tessier’s unsettling ambivalence about settlement and farming and yet we also receive the delight that Jaidyn Fenton finds in sowing seed into loam. There are many moments of subtle solace as in Anna Yin’s “Birds’ Song” and also surprising images and word twists as in the work of Bernadette Rule. John B. Lee’s “Elegy for Al Purdy” provided lines that will linger for me in the image of a blue heron flying at dusk:
“…in wordless height of draft/ becomes the thought of loft/ and what it is to be/ both object and metaphor/ all mournful/ and uncapturable as wind.”
The word anthology comes from the Greek for a collection of flowers and, as in any good anthology, you will find a wide and complementary arrangement of blooms here. Beautiful, fascinating, unfamiliar, at times spikey and exciting. More than that, these collected poems return our attention to our collective and individual connections with the land around us and invite re-cognition and re-visioning into those relationships. How might we see our own lives through a poet’s eyes?
Towards the end of the book, there are interviews with the poets, providing a second way to pay attention to each poet’s work by setting it in the context of their personal lives and perspectives. Each poet is asked to reflect on their relationship to land and home and to their spiritual grounding as well as their motivations and hopes in writing poetry related to the environment. By focusing on hope, it becomes apparent that there is no one way to be hopeful in these times but that hope, much like poetry, is an individual and active process. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote in his Theology of Hope that when faith develops into hope, it “causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart.”
Poetry in Place speaks to our hopeful, unquiet hearts, renewing our attention to the natural world and calling us into better relationship with creation and Creator.
Bowen and Van Brenk are leading a workshop featuring themes from this book at CC‘s conference!
