Poetic reflections on a rural way of life

After the harvest

Keagan Hawthorne
Gaspereau Press, 2023.

“Don’t tell me what the poets are doin’.” So wrote Gord Downie, the late leader singer of the well-known Canadian band The Tragically Hip, in 1998. Perhaps he didn’t mean this sentiment all that personally or seriously (he also published his own poetry collection with the not so serious title Coke Machine Glow). A serious look at what current poets are up to, though, can be a healthy and edifying exercise in any number of ways. There are many poets capable of highlighting the beauty and tension inherent in everyday life in a way that deepens our understanding of the past and present. One such Canadian poet is Keagan Hawthorne. His recently released collection is entitled After the Harvest.

This title could indicate a work by an older, more experienced writer – yet this is Hawthorne’s first full-scale published book. The harkening after past things is not all that unusual among younger poets nowadays. This is no mere overly sentimental journey longing for a simpler, more natural time. Nor are we continually positioned at the feet of a kindly grandpa or granny to harvest pearls of forgotten wisdom and/or lore. This poet is much too clever to wallow overly much in that sort of stuff.

The last word of the Hawthorne’s title does point the reader toward a rural locale and sensibility – specifically an ancestral farm that, for all practical purposes, has vanished from the earth.

An early poem in the collection called “Arrival” takes us to a place: “wherein the dead are planted / for their final flowering.” This firmly establishes the elegiac aspect of the work as a whole. There is yet more at play however.

The very next offering called “Communion” is set all the way back in 1985 where three stanzas are labelled Bread, Salt and Wine. The title connotes a sacrament, yet there is more going on here still. The stanzas labels also reference a longstanding tradition of bringing those very items as gifts to a housewarming. This exemplifies the poet’s frequent practice of interweaving the practical realities and folk traditions of rural life with sacramental allusions. A grandmother depicted in the poem is directing grain trucks using a CB radio while maintaining close enough attention to a beer and a smoke. An interesting communion indeed.

The poet himself owns up to borrowing the “language and rhythms of ‘The Anglican Book of Common Prayer’” as poetic jumping off points in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book. We wouldn’t want to leave the impression, however, that he merely hacks borrowed verbiage together to suit his purposes. The fruits of his labour often achieve mellifluous lines and striking imagery. The opening lines of “The Benedictus of Branwell Goose” provide a fine example of both: “Blessed be the farmer’s pretty daughter, / for in this season of the low-slung sun / when the pond’s / breath rises to the reeds / and feathers like a gosling /all the grassy wings of earth.”

Can we glean a larger purpose inherent in these musings? A certain amount of evidence indicates that we can. The poet acknowledges an aesthetic and philosophic debt to eminent poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky. Among Zwicky’s many publications is a book co-authored with husband and poet Robert Bringhurst called Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, aptly described as a harrowing look at an earth where humanity itself is imperiled.

Hawthorne’s book may not tell us so much about that crisis as show its effects on a rural way of life that needs to be somehow preserved. Amid the sorrow that life is engagingly portrayed with a pallet of humour, beauty, passion and insight. In the poem “On Not Going In” we leave the poet as he hesitates … “beneath a sky of stars / whose lives are already extinguished / and still their light goes on shedding itself / across impossible distances.”

After the Harvest sheds a light on a locale and a way of life – one corner of our poetic God’s creation – that we should all appreciate while we can and preserve what we can of it.