Under Review: Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham

The poetry is sparse, bare, leaving lots of white space on the page, which I imagine represents the unknown. So much white space. Couplets dominate, two lines working together or in opposition, run down the page in brief observations, thoughts cascading among discoveries found as in the 17-page title poem:

A small pink curl

of cloud.

No language 

for any of it.

Edges of photographs

disintegrating. Names

on the census misspelled.

Creases erasing the facts

Sadly, Graham notes, “Sometimes / a family doesn’t have / a story-keeper”.

Graham probes birth certificates, census records, ship’s records, and photographs. She questions, “Just a married name”. She admits, “I miss the lives / I have not lived”. And she draws the poem to a close, opening the way for the second section of the collection, “The Great-Grandmothers:”

Graham’s crisp writing carries us forward into the puzzle of the great-grandmothers, where she gives each one her own form and voice on the page. Each is distinct, but the veil that shrouds each one makes them unknowable. Whether from Northern Ireland, or the “old country” of Sophia Czyzowski, or the beauty of the Clyde, or the one wearing a babushka in a photo, enticed by the promises of Uncle Prokop (“You can work / for yourself / not have anyone / over you”), each is mother to many, each resilient. Each unique under the homesteader category, each eking out a tough living on the prairies, each living a hard life, which takes us to the third section, “Toward an Origin Story”, where:

Under Russia’s boot,

under England’s boot,

they sailed off

to become the boot

of the plains, stamping 

out the grasses and trees –

Smoothly, Laurie D. Graham broadens the focus to include environmental degradation and loss – “every arable, pilfered inch” – as well as the poli-colonial attitude toward both homesteaders and Indigenous. Yet, and despite the near-impossible task of surviving and prospering despite the burden of false promises, “a mute love, a love with no / past and no grounding, // blossoms in the children” for this country. 

The final section of Calling It Back to Me is called “A Good Closing”, but before we get to that resolution, Graham’s tone brims with barely held rage and new awareness:

I’ve come to know

differently the passage

of time. I return and return, 

recall ever more poorly

the stubble, low poplars yellowing,

as the heat and the fires 

alter them irrevocably.

…

It’s not the willow weeping.

Laurie D. Graham begins Calling It Back to Me with an epigraph by the Irish poet and writer, Eavan Boland: “A hundred years ago she was a child. But where? Strange to think that once the circumstances of her life were simple and available. They have become, with time, fragments and guesswork.” In many respects, this quote leads us perfectly into the collection; it also summarizes Graham’s search throughout Calling It Back to Me. The quote speaks, like Graham’s poetry, to the challenging search that many of us are undertaking in attempts to understand who we are and what meaning can be found in the characteristics and generational traumas that haunt. But the collection offers more than “fragments and guesswork.”

Graham takes us into an era that we would rather leave ploughed under, hidden, buried. TNQ’s editor will confirm that I am late submitting this review. I read the collection, greedily. I read it again. We can know things, historical things, in our heads, but we tend to carry rather rosy images in our hearts of the settling of this country. Graham does not belabour the point of broken promises – to homesteaders, to Indigenous Peoples of the plains – but it is clear. Her words are beautiful and blunt. The destructive result of colonial / imperialist policies affected not only the people who naively believed the promises and treaties, but they destroyed an environment, sacrificed people and the earth itself. 

In conclusion, I offer a long quote from one of my favourite passages, the final page of the first section, “Calling It Back to Me” (17).

The four women in the four photos

wear dresses and pin back their hair.

Two with lace-up shoes.

One with corset. One with babushka.

Their legs and bodies.

Faces. Closed mouths.

A plant on a stand. A bench seat

at the mouth of woods.

Outside in the sun with.

Outside and gathered with.

Outside alone.

In a studio alone.

This is the reckoning process.

To be careful, precise

about my thanks.

Would they be happy,

Would they be dismayed

to see me here in this future.

Calling It Back to Me is a collection that seems simple and direct on the surface, but so much could be written about this single page. My mind and imagination leap. Calling It Back to Me is an elegy for the grandmothers, a history primer of prairie settlement – for the people involved and the environment – and a hard look at the unanticipated consequences of colonization. Laurie D. Graham is a story-writer; Calling It Back to Me is a story-keeper.

Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham