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Antigonish Review
# 128
| Alison
Calder |
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Purple for Sky by Carol Bruneau. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant
Books, 2000. 407 pp. $29.95.
Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems by George
Amabile. Winnipeg: The Muses' Company, 2001. 159 pp. $17.95.
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Carol Bruneau is no novice writer, having already
published two collections of short stories (Under the Angel Mill
and Depth Rapture). Her sizeable first novel, Purple for Sky,
describes the complicated lives of three complicated women. Each of the
novel's three narrators speaks with a distinct voice: Lindy, a feisty
shopkeeper whose crusty manner and salty tongue belie her dangerously
meltable heart; Ruby, Lindy's 90-year-old aunt, whose sense of propriety
and order slowly slips as she slides into increasing dementia; and Euphemia,
Ruby's long-deceased mother, whose voice resonates from the secret journal
she left behind. At the novel's opening, Lindy and Ruby are living in
relative isolation, as they have for years, tending their shop and keeping
to themselves, looking down upon their customers' illiteracy and poor
speech. But the shop is in decline, and so is Ruby, and Lindy's attempts
to deal with both of them propel the narrative. To make matters worse,
Lindy, who is slowly and reluctantly falling in love with Wilf, a road
construction foreman working nearby, discovers that he feels the same.
How can she cope with these threats to her stable, unchanging life? Ultimately,
when Ruby's condition worsens to the point that she can no longer be left
alone and when a break-in at the shop precipitates a crisis, Lindy must
accept the support of the townspeople and allow herself to be helped by
others, a discovery that frees her to reach for both love and friendship
before they pass her by.
Though Euphemia, Ruby, and Lindy come from different
generations, their interwoven narratives allow Bruneau to parallel the
different kinds of entrapment each woman experiences. Euphemia's journal
tells of a hard family life that cannot suppress her lively imagination.
Her innate sensuality, expressed in the luxurious fabric and rich design
of a quilt she makes when she is first married, is stifled by the pious
family into which she marries. Ruby, her daughter, seems similarly imprisoned.
Her parents direct her into a loveless marriage with the scion of a local
bakery, a "good catch" who turns out to want her family's shop
more than he wants her. Dutiful Ruby stays with him, however, becoming
the 'good daughter' while her wild younger sister Dora becomes increasingly
hard-drinking and promiscuous. After Dora's departure and eventual death,
Ruby takes in Dora's daughter Lindy, who works in the shop and builds
a self-protective shell that she never wants to leave. Lindy's own rebellious
streak, expressed only once in a desultory sexual encounter with a travelling
salesman, eventually finds its only outlet in her continual reading of
tabloid newspapers, under Ruby's disapproving eye. There is little joy
in these tightly circumscribed worlds where women live under the watchful
eyes of other women until they in turn become the watchful, monitoring
eyes that imprison others. Lindy's true emancipation finally comes not
through a conventional love affair, although that happens as well, but
through her discovery of female friendship, as she begins to figure out
how women can support and not just limit each other.
I must admit it took me a while to get into this
novel, though by the end I was glad I'd stuck with it. Much of Bruneau's
narrative is told in Lindy's voice, and the pages are peppered with vibrant
phrases: a woman clutches her purse "like a Saint Bernard holding
a keg," the scent of paperwhites is described as "used Depends
mixed with scorched wire." But first-person, present-tense narration
- "now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that" - is difficult to
pace, and Bruneau is not quite on top of it at the novel's start: there
is too much showing and not enough telling, and the result is slow and
heavy. Detailed narrative strands are developed only to be abandoned -
the significance of Ruby's visits to the cemetery is never developed,
and whatever happened to the skeleton that Wilf finds near the novel's
beginning? The pace picks up dramatically, however, when Ruby starts reading
Euphemia's journals, which are addressed to Euphemia's dead sister Fan.
These passages, tightly written and evocative, have an immediacy (despite
their retrospective nature) that renders the characters and situations
vividly. The journals allow Euphemia to comment on her own story economically
but evocatively, as when she describes Fan's death:
For even now I cannot let myself think
you weren't glimpsing something as you slipped like that from Mam's
grip, from Pa and me bent over the bedside. It's impossible to believe
a child could take her leave without someplace to go, however dark and
distant, without someone or something waiting on the other side.
It's purely sentimental, a part of me knows.
But how could I feel or think otherwise, watching you leave us? (151)
A reader might want more connections between
characters - what exactly is Lindy's response to reading Euphemia's journal,
anyway? - but on the whole Bruneau provides a nice portrait of a woman
finally coming into her own. Purple for Sky won the Dartmouth Award
for Fiction in 2001.
Collections of "New and Selected Poems"
sometimes read like a last desperate gasp for readership. This is definitely
not the case with Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems by George
Amabile. Amabile has already published poetry in over one hundred anthologies,
magazines, journals, and periodicals, and this collection shows that he
is still at the top of his game. The poems seem to have been selected
for unity, though not uniformity, and certain themes and questions recur:
family, nature, how to relate to the world as individuals and in community.
Tasting the Dark opens strongly with the 1972 poem "Accidental
Death," about the death of Amabile's brother Anthony as a child.
Amabile manages poignancy while avoiding sentiment through strong images,
as in his snapshots of family reactions:
My mother's face in a grey
doorway, pretty and kind
until it caved in like a wet
hillside of flowers.
These strong images continue. In fact, for a
collection that spans almost 30 years of writing, Amabile's lyric style
seems to vary little, though this could be a result of the selection process.
I would describe his lines as hard and precise, but this gives the impression
of cold, mechanical poetry, which is not at all the case. Amabile's word
choice is deliberate: his style is measured rather than loose and vernacular.
(Granted, some of the poems are more talky than others, but one would
never slot Amabile in the prairie vernacular school.) I found myself paying
particular attention to line breaks, each of which is considered, as in
the first stanza of "Aging in the Force Field of Dali's Melted Clocks":
Among sparse clouds, flying
east I watch a disk
of light on the upholstered seatback stretch
out of shape and darken too
quickly from gold
to syrupy, coppery dusk.
Amabile's poetry can be both personal and philosophical,
and this combination works particularly well in some of his new poems.
If I had to pick two clunkers in this collection, I would settle on "Evening
Out" (from 1995) and "Mikey" (a new poem) for completely
different reasons: "Evening Out" because the form seems
so mathematical and strangled that it gave me the sensation of drinking
desert-dry red wine, and "Mikey" because the narrator veers
into schmaltz at the poem's end. But most of the time Amabile hits the
balance beautifully, as in the lovely poem "Grief," which opens
with mathematics and works its way through to the longing and sadness
we feel for dead friends and others we have lost. These poems can be delicate,
turning on small details, mittens, bottle caps, gulls. In "The Gift,"
written for Carol Shields, Amabile compares the storyteller's voice to
a "map of blue shadow" that is
a deep impression left in the snow
by a beautiful animal, graceful
and so quick it can outrun
thought,
time,
and the dull thud of
recurrence
like the voice of a great writer.
Amabile too manages to avoid that "dull
thud," moving away from pronouncements and into the details of the
day. If I can identify a progression in these poems, it would be that
the narrator's voice becomes more vulnerable throughout the book, as in
the four-part poem "Basilico," where the narrator anxiously
nurses three basil plants and remembers his late mother and how the sound
of breaking glass "trips/ the same stab of panic [he] had/ to control
as a child whenever she left." I read this increasing openness as
a sign of security, the mark of a generous writer confident in his poetry.
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