unpacking the poem:
Regional reviewers focus on regional poems
Reviewer Wendy Donawa unpacks a different poem every month. She examines the poem in a way she hopes is helpful for readers and other poets to understand how craft works in a particular poem, for a particular effect.
REVIEWER:
Wendy Donawa calls Victoria home, and is grateful to live on the unceded lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Her prior life included 36 years in Barbados, as a UWI student, a Barbados Community College instructor, and a Barbados Museum curator.
Her first book, Thin Air of the Knowable (BrickBooks, 2017), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Our Bodies Unanswered Questions (Frontenac House) followed in 2021. Her poems are also found in anthologies and magazines including Arc Poetry Magazine, The New Quarterly, Canadian Review of Books, Prairie Fire, Literary Review of Canada, Plenitude, Room, Freefall, and online Poetry Pause.
Poet Wendy Donawa
OCTOBER 2023: jenna butler
Song to the Boreal (excerpt)
1
I return home craving the forest.
Too late for spruce-tip tea, branch candles gone long and waxy green,
I satisfy myself with fireweed jelly, early saskatoons, ground raspberry.
Browse the canes and brambles, startling deer, white-crowned
sparrows.
I’m looking for berries, pulp and dark juice. Things that leave a mark.
2
Svalbard has scoured me clean, beach glass at a king tide. Reel of salt,
The taste of it ground into my lips, my skin burnt by wind. How will you
know me like this, soil scuffed from my palm lines? How will I know
myself?
I come back marvelling at trees, unconvinced by dwarf birch, polar
willow. Black spruce, trembling aspen, wildling crab; I pull green
apples,
sink my teeth for the astringency on my tongue.
Wild harvest means coming home: I pluck chickweed, lamb’s quarters,
dandelion greens, splash vinegar to brighten, brew bush tea. I am
hungry
at my roots for the forest, lilt of honey on my tongue a kind of
grounding.
3
Sing diamond willow for carving, red elder bitter with cyanide. Wild
gooseberry and twinflower, bog orchard, sedge.
Pluck burdock, plantain, styptic yarrow.
Give me early afternoon under the canopy, bush tea rumbling with
bees;
Let me sink glassine fingers into the moss and I’ll know I’m home.
4
Mid June, and the boreal kindles like tallow.
No toxins across the water; here, one Players on the frontage grass and
everything goes up, black spruce rickety with gum.
Each summer a little longer, a little hotter, and still the quads idling
out
In the muskeg, stink of gas in the deep woods. Used to be forked
lightning,
Now it’s Friday night bush parties, chainsaw sparks, I come home from
Water and ice to a forest spitting resin like a midsummer rain. We
watch
the news, the wind. There’s not enough water in Svalbard to put this
forest out if it burns.
5
Peat fires know to go underground, run out along the roots. A whole
stand burning slowly from underneath.
Our first winter on the land, we lit a bonfire in a space of cleared
ground
to keep warm. Diamond willow, balsam poplar; everything we felled
went into the flames, a long slow burn. Potatoes in the coals and they
would roast all day, pried from charred skins at twilight as the deep
cold
came down.
We learned that fire in the north is subterrain, that even the snow
refused
our circle, its heap of ash. Dug out the ground a week later and it was
hot
enough that you couldn’t hold the soil without gloves. It smelt of roots
and hair, a living, feral scent. Those are the fires you learn to fear, the
ground going out from under your feet in an instant. Nothing left
but cinders grasshoppering into the dark.
6
Bedstraw, marsh marigold, bunchberry. White conks on diamond
willow that burn with a slow smoke, scent of anise seed. Take the pain
out of bad lungs.
This forest is home in its ways of knowing, being known. Grouse
drumming
In the deep woods, ropes of toad spawn in the pond. Underfoot, wild
strawberry, wood violet, porcupine spoor. Move with a measured pace
and catch the boreal staring back.
Poet Jenna Butler
Dr. Jenna Butler is an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor. Finalist for the Governor-General’s Award and Canada Reads. Author of three books of poetry, a travelogue, and two collections of essays.
Unpacking “Song to the Boreal”
Unpacking “Song to the Boreal”
These verses are an excerpt from the poem sequence “Song to the Boreal”, which ends Jenna Butler’s collection Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard. Jenna is a poet, academic, and off-the-grid organic farmer from northern Alberta’s boreal forests. During June, 2014, she was writer in residence for a community of artists, writers, and scientists on a sailing expedition into Norway’s Arctic islands of Svalbard.
Her poems convey the brilliant endless light of an arctic summer solstice, the uncanny beauty of salty landscapes bleached by sun, of calving glaciers, the chill of whalebone heaps, abandoned whaling stations. She records also how human intervention and environmental degradation mark the landscape, as they do the lands of the boreal north she loves, “Players in the frontage grass.”
A thousand miles away, she craves her own northern home, and the poems excerpted here convey a passionate engagement with the land upon her return. Although she has missed some of high summer’s foraging “too late for spruce-tip tea”, her absence makes her see the familiar through new eyes (“marvelling at trees, unconvinced by dwarf birch”).
Jenna Butler is an ecstatic poet. With an intensity that brought John Donne to mind,she celebrates the boreal with an embrace of all the sensations: the forest’s smells, flavours, textures, colours, sounds. Physical sensation becomes almost spiritual in its intensity. All the forest’s offerings that can be eaten, drunk, tasted, cooked, preserved, are honoured, a feast. “I am hungry at my roots for the forest, lilt of honey on my tongue a kind of grounding.” Yes, she is also a beekeeper! “Bush tea rumbling with bees.” Beyond consideration of food, the forest also seen as pharmacy: who knew of the cyanide in red elder, or that yarrow is styptic? Or that smoking diamond willow takes the pain out of bad lungs?
Many think of the boreal north, if they think of it at all, as a freezing wilderness with scrub bush and stunted trees. But encyclopedic lists of the poet’s foraged riches are laid out like jewels that encourage us to do some research. The names of things are themselves often startling and poetically beautiful: fireweed jelly, polar willow, trembling aspen, diamond willow, marsh marigold, porcupine spoor. “Things that leave a mark.”
In ancient times, poets were often thought to have foresight, to foretell and warn the community of coming danger. Jenna Butler’s poems are prescient, written years before our present appalling wildfire season, even before the Fort Mac fire, yet she aptly describes how “fires know to go underground, run out along the roots.” She has been noticing human irresponsibility, “each summer a little longer, a little hotter” but “still the quads idling out in the muskeg…bush parties, chainsaw sparks.”
Poet as activist. Yet always returning to a mystical one-ness with the land. “This forest is home in its ways of knowing, being known….Move with a measured pace and catch the boreal staring back.”