Book Reviews

Abiding Space

Alice Major (Author)
The Occupied World. University of Alberta Press
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Reviewed by Neil Querengesser

Alice Major, Edmonton’s first poet laureate, is one of Canada’s finest writers. Since 1988 she has published a children’s novel and seven books of poetry, most of which have been nominated for or have won awards. Her creations have their genesis in a brilliant, encyclopedic, and inventive mind and are brought to fruition through meticulous craftsmanship. History, hagiography, geography, geology, physics, politics, mathematics, mythology, archaeology, the arts—certainly human relationships: there is little that sooner or later is not transformed by her verse. An overarching intelligence characterizes each of her collections, imparting to them a sense of design and purpose.

The Occupied World, her first collection since No Monster (2002), is no exception to this principle. The poems, most of which celebrate her adopted city in one way or another, are organized into six sections. The first, “Contemplating the City,” is a poetic sequence that in its original version won the Malahat Review’s long poem contest. Following the pattern of ancient Roman rituals for founding a colony, these poems offer a distinctive view of Edmonton and its omnipresent river, the North Saskatchewan, that “curls, bows to each whorl / of the compass, but always makes for the east, / ushers us to the feet of the sun.” The second section, “A Book of Days,” reinvents the year even as it harks back to the nineteenth-century Chambers’ original. With titles like “Gule of August” and “Good Thief Sunday,” the poems do end runs around our ordinary perceptions of the days and the seasons, compelling engagement with the world we occupy, particularly in the cunning uppercut of the environmentalist “Borrowing Days.” The third section, “Kore,” is a poignant reworking of the Demeter-Persephone myths from the perspective of a modern childless woman. The “Kinderszenen” section features poems about children that recall the title of Robert Schumann’s piano works of the same name. The reader may profit by listening to these pieces, particularly the final melody, “Der Dichter spricht,” while she reads the poems. The “Messages from Planet E” section is an ingenious mingling of the scientific and the literary. A brilliant illustration of the difficultly defined phenomena of solitons can be found in “Alice, Downtown.” The exact mathematics of “In the City of the Poor” where “irrationals / drop from the number line” is capable of making razor cuts across the reader’s conscience. And an unlikely juxtaposition of the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven particle detector and the Sacrorum Rituum infuses the “The Sifters of Miracle” with inspiring delight. The final section, “Root Zones,” sinks its poetic shafts deep into ancient Albertan soils, and into ancient poetic forms as well, as it includes a rare and finely executed virelay in “The Empress Formation.”

There is a diamond clarity to these poems, and a conviction that, just as matter predominates over antimatter by a tiny margin, so what is right and good will edge out their opposites in this world our dwelling place:

In all the ephemeral collisions
between humanity and space, there’s hope
we might achieve a balance on the side of grace,
a slight preponderance of beauty.

These are poems to make you catch your breath.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #193 (Summer 2007), Canada Reads. (pg. 164 - 165)

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