 Snow
Formations
AUTHOR: Carolyn Marie Souaid ISBN: 0921833857
Weary of her humdrum existence, a woman packs up and heads for Arctic Quebec, where she hopes to find a new lease on life teaching native children. She quickly discovers, however, that the Inuit have far more to teach her than she, them, as she slowly learns that each day on this earth is a rich sensory experience, not merely to be lived, but savoured. Loosely based on the author's own three-year experience in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, Snow Formations takes a realistic look at the modern Inuit world through post-industrial eyes, always walking the fine line between idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. Steeped in contradiction, this is Canada's North with all its trappings: igloos and pool halls, raw meat and radio, dogsleds and diapers. The North may be great and white, but it is not always pretty. Snow Formations began as a thirteen-minute commission for the CBC Radio series "Home and Away," featuring new work by five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective.
REVIEWS: "The collection Snow Formations is loosely based on Carolyn Marie Souaid's own experiences in Inuit settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast in Northern Canada. Souaid's first two books were both short-listed for Quebec's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. This third book came about from a 13-minute commission for the CBC radio series Home and Away that featured five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective. Souaid is passionate about the physical beauty of nature. She wants us to notice "the Earth's exquisite intricacies...Victorian lace./Spiderwebs. the organza wing/ of a common fly" so that we too can appreciate the scrap-yard world of the north, an "old brown woman in mukluks/and mismatched clothes embellishing the days/with colourful yearn." The relationship of the modern Inuit world juxtaposed with the "strapping, white, freshness" of the landscape is a bracing one. The poems, like "snow formations," tell about the hard-edged life of the North. It's in this title-section, containing the bulk of the poems, that Souaid's voice comes across best. In The Student, a poem in eight parts, Souaid makes us uncomfortable with a student-teacher relationship. Part 5 is particularly unnerving, the "student" and his teacher/lover out hunting. The student makes a kill, with Souaid superimposing the "thatch of blood" in the snow with lust and love - a raw realism even where there is romance. Souaid can smack you in the face, sting you with the unexpected: he floats off to sleep until the abrupt noise of his own fart startles him to life... Seven years later, he cocks a .22 and blows the ocean through his ears. ...but Souaid pushes us to answer her unanswerable questions. In the Elder, Souaid asks: Outside her window, it is always the same plodding horizon. If this is her story, how can I tell it?" —Montreal Gazette "...Both the mood and method of St. Lambert, Quebec poet Carolyn Marie Souaid's Snow Formations, her third collection, are entirely different. Based on her experiences teaching in northern Quebec, it features pared-down, imagistic intensity and an ironic tone. The first section, pre-departure, conveys her boredom and lack of fulfillment. Then comes her flight north: "my fissured, brown/liver-spotted towns/vaporized in the dark air/and then I woke, the world had accumulated again/ outside my window/ the strapping, white, freshness of it/ shoveling life/back into my eyes." Of course, this is a familiar ritual (reject civilization, reclaim the senses in an encounter with the Natives and Nature). But Souaid is no sentimentalist; wary of easy answers, she's as cautionary as she is celebratory about the North and Inuit life. The images are particularly vivid—and unsettling—when she writes of the natural world. "Cabin Fever" evokes a feeling of menace as winter closes in ("the grey void of water, /the one wrong slip to certain death..the cold shoulder/ of snow against the door, the house"). Elsewhere, she writes of the solstice: "Earth suddenly sped up a notch while/ Hades breathed deeply from the night between the rocks." In one poem, Souaid invites the reader to "feed on the world,/one breath at a time." That invitation is made compelling by these vivid, brooding poems." —The Toronto Star
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Signature titles by Carolyn Marie Souaid: |
SHORTLISTED
FOR THE QWF A.M. KLEIN POETRY AWARD
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