Review of October

October

Not often are the divisions that beset and define our country played out in the work of a single poet. Carolyn Marie Souaid is a brave exception. Her tender, hurting poems show what can happen when family politics incarnate so much love, so much heartfelt pain.


— Mark Abley

More Reviews of this title

October

Those who remember the stylish introspection and hushed elegance of Montrealer Carolyn Marie Souaid's debut, Swimming into the Light, will be surprised by her second collection, October. The memory of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte's murder (he was killed on October 10, 1970, by the FLQ) has darkened Souaid's voice far beyond its earlier, and quieter, elegiac stance. Many of these new poems possess the urgency of dispatches and are the more powerful for it. It's obvious that October depends on intuitive intensity rather than artfulness to press its arresting effects and in doing so the book seems to have secured for itself a certain emotional authority.


The Montreal Gazette

October

Thematic books, whether poetry or short fiction, have a built-in potential liability. Typically, the entire book strictly conforms to a specified theme. (For example, all the stories are about adultery.) But if the theme is merely suggested, if only the majority of stories or poems conforms, how does one frame the rest of the work to complement the core material? The natural answer might be to have the remaining content reflect, symbolize, or parallel whatever is implied by the title. In this way, there is both cohesion and variety. Anything less would be fragmentary.

Carolyn Marie Souaid has chosen a very obvious unifying principle for her second book of poems, October, namely Quebec's October Crisis of 1970. I was at first a bit surprised by how little of the book is actually about the well-known signposts of that infamous period in Quebec history: the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte, the War Measures Act, the FLQ. Then it gradually became evident that all the poems not obviously pertinent to the theme are still relevant to some degree.

The first poem, "Argument", is about a mother dying of cancer. Her child understands the cancer as "a lone dark bug feeding/on the liver, the kidneys, the brain," and goes on to employ a series of nature-based images for this mysterious force that has entered her mother's body:

we could always tell that summer was dying
by the kinds of apples farmers were hauling off their trucks
and how the colours outside always bloomed and sharpened
in their final hours
before greying-down for good

somehow she had vanished
in the middle of the night
the way an earthworm slips into the raw dirt
silently, leaving nothing behind
but an empty corridor
of itself


This cannot be an easy thing, to write of a parent leaving by small, painful increments, in some ways worse than a sudden departure. But Souaid calmly and methodically builds up the tragedy, expressing more of a child's lack of comprehension than an adult's grief, and setting the stage for the shocks described in the ensuing poems.

The next section of the book--the central one--is "October". Like the first (apparently unrelated) poem, the ones in this section are full of foreboding; death, loss, the fear of both looming overhead like one of those military helicopters. Souaid uses the framing technique here, even as specific poems reflect the title. There is good reason for her to do so. The poet was all of eleven years old at the time of the crisis, living in St. Lambert (where she still resides), the site of Pierre Laporte's kidnapping as he played football with his son. It's not surprising that such a startling incident would throw a new light on all her previous assumptions about living in a secure and peaceful environment.

In fact, the real theme of this book is not a national crisis but a personal one. One could call it the loss of innocence. Mothers die. Fathers can be snatched from football games and killed. The world is a dangerous place. Other poems deal with hints of pedophilia, racial prejudice, the ravages of poverty, cruelty to animals, and other threats to a child's tranquil existence.

Souaid has a deft hand, even when painting essentially one gloomy picture after another . . . October is a surprisingly tranquil book about a very turbulent time.


— Louise Fabiani Montreal Review of Books

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