‘I knew I’d survive here’

Brown Eyes Watching: Reflections of a Black Canadian Poet

Vilma Blenman
Pickering Press, 2025.

I’m drawn toward poetry that is visceral, descriptive and accessible rather than academic. I was excited to discover this new collection by Vilma Blenman, which accomplishes all three. Like a filmmaker, Blenman pulls the reader into her scenes, so that we feel as though we are experiencing them first-hand.

Blenman has lived her adult life in Canada where she worked as a therapist and high school teacher. She first arrived in Pickering, Ontario from Jamaica at the age of 17 in the middle of winter (which happens to be the very month/season we’re in now). In “First Flowers” she describes that experience: “When I arrived in February, / forsythia bushes still slept / stark naked, dreaming of yellow stars exploding / but I dreamt of hot hibiscus / hedges, of red petals opening.” When daffodils appeared in spring, “Colour would call to me like a recess bell . . . When I spied daffodils that first spring, / saw colour rising from Canadian soil, / flowers that defied death, / I knew I’d survive here.”

Sustaining faith

The collection is a smorgasbord of rich, sensory memories of Jamaica and the realities of life in Canada for a person of colour; homages to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes; musings on Black history and the joy of watching President Obama’s inauguration. It is underscored by the faith which has sustained Blenman throughout life.

In section one, “Watching and Remembering,” Blenman remembers the church mothers and aunties in Jamaica who “brightened grey spaces with their floral dresses, / their lacy hats or cotton head ties” and “poured courage into each girl.” “Motherland and Maple Land” affirms that “maple syrup and sugarcane molasses / can both suffice to sweeten sorrow” and that both her native and adopted countries are “prized parts of me.”

In the second section, “Watching and Praying,” Blenman writes unflinchingly about raising Black sons in a white-dominated society. Blenman pulls no punches. In “No Birthday Boys” her son tells her “Black / boys go to funerals, Mom. The funeral parlour / is the new / after-party.” “Good Boys, Dead Boys” concludes with the line “Good boys or bad / boys, sooner or later they all make news as dead boys.” The pain in these poems is palpable. This section includes poems about the significance of freedom and emancipation to a people who have lived the opposite reality for centuries.

Responses to suffering

The third section, “Watching and Feeling,” opens with an anaphoric poem after the murder of George Floyd called “I Can’t Breathe.” Written in oratorical flow, it pours out the anguish of centuries of the injustices of racism. “Black Boy Blues” opens with the lines “If we must die, do not lie. / Say Melanin marked us even in the dark, / even after being handcuffed and placed on the ground.” Further on it says: “If we must die, let all know why – finally, / why nine minutes with a knee on a man’s neck / is enough and why a traffic stop can be a death trap.” The section ends with triumphant hope in “Black Girl Takes the Mic.”

“Watching & Wondering,” the fourth section, includes poems on a variety of themes, from the impact of casual encounters and conversations overheard in the supermarket, to generational musings, to responses to local and international events. In “Strong Black Woman” are the lines “She said people see her coping and think she’s conquering, but even Everest isn’t shrinking. It’s as tall as time / and she’s as tired as a tornado just ending its demolition . . . But at my age I must learn what she didn’t know / then – the wisdom of weakness, the limits of unlimited / energy, for even steel bends in fire and a rock cracks over / time under pressure.” Blenman’s poem “Ruby Greene Sings” is an ekphrastic poem that describes how a painting of African American opera and gospel singer Ruby Mae Greene gave her courage during her journey with breast cancer.

Blenman’s poetry is attuned to the heaviness of life on a global, national and personal scale. And yet, she does not despair – or keep silent. One of her poems near the end of the book, “Holding Hope,” explores finding encouragement after tragedy and comes full circle from the theme of her initial, middle-of-winter poem, “First Flowers.” She writes: “Some days you cannot feel warmth / neither in toes nor head nor heart / nor any part where feelings lie buried. / But believe me when I say spring follows . . . colours will come calling again.”