“Two Kinds of Light” Earth Day in Leith Churchyard: Poems in Search of Tom Thomson by Bernadette Rule
[Earth Day in Leith Churchyard: Poems in Search of Tom Thomson by Bernadette Rule, Seraphim Editions, 2015, Niagara Falls, ON.]
Virginia Woolf was once watching her sister Vanessa dance. Being I suppose somewhat awkward on her feet, she was admiring but not envious. She said something like: “I can’t dance as well as Vanessa, but maybe I can write as well as she dances.” The anecdote goes to the relations between the arts, how we look to find among our personal talents a fit response to the achievements we admire in other forms. The work of cross-fertilization goes on among all artists and raises questions about each form’s native strengths and constraints. The intersection of poetry and painting — a personal favorite — has beguiled practitioners in both forms for millennia. Criticism has named an entire tradition that has risen around it — Ekphrastic verse — a type of poem that is alive and well in contemporary practice. Our own Bernadette Rule’s recent Earth Day in Leith Churchyard: Poems in Search of Tom Thomson is a worthy and suggestive contribution to the field. Thomson is often credited with putting the Canadian wilderness on the world map as it were: those hundreds of small wooden boards with their almost expressionistic plein-air dramas of splotch-and-run represent his own searches for a sense of place and belonging. The story of his wanderings and mysterious death are iconic for the purpose. You can intuit in Rule’s poems something of her own exploration of home and Canadian place — she has lived in Hamilton for thirty years, while her roots are in Kentucky. “What is a border when you cross it?” she asks. For Rule, the limits of the canvas stand in for other borders that can be both transgressed and respected.
The title gives us a clue to Rule’s approach. Poems go in search of paintings that are gone in search of place. We see Thomson in these poems continually heading off, setting up, getting started. “I’ll waken … then strike out for the deserted / lumber camp near the river’s mouth.” Every poem a departure. But how do poems actually search? I think of someone lifting a mattress to look for a lost sock, rummaging through a jewelry box, or on a grander scale, leveling binoculars over untrodden mountains.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Jeffery Donaldson {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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