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
november 2023: jÓnÍna kirton
REDress
declared a day of mourning
for the missing
I hang REDress on my balcony
go outside to look for others
nothing all balconies clear of red
so I walk the streets
hoping to find others
few know that I am one
of the “lucky ones”
raped never murdered
only parts of me are missing
now sixty
I worry for the lost
for the “lucky ones”
aware that porn producer once said
every day another girl turns eighteen
so many bus stops truck stops with one-way tickets
grief cuts bone
the daily dismemberment of our hearts
as our girls are manipulated
reported missing
and their loved ones left
to drag rivers in Winnipeg
while others walk highways of tears
where it has been said
you can feel
the spirits of the missing
and today in this city on this day of mourning
their REDress arms empty
they wave to the cars that pass them by
on roadsides on balconies
all reminders of what we are missing
(Jónína Kirton’s poem “REDress” was published in An Honest Woman (Talonbooks, 2017).
Poet Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet, was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. A Talonbooks’ author, her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, a memoir that merges poetry with lyric prose, was released in 2022.
Unpacking “REDress”
REDress is a poem of mourning. Heavy with grief and outrage, it is dedicated to Métis installation artist Jaime Black, who launched the first REDress Project in 2014 with her collection and curating of 600 red dresses to mark the loss of missing and murdered Indigenous women and two-spirited people.*
Métis/Icelandic poet Jónína Kirton’s poem “REDress” illustrates the power of stark and straightforward language appropriate for the harsh reality, the “dismemberment of our hearts.” The poem’s speaker, looking for support, goes “outside to look for others/nothing all balconies clear of red/so I walk the streets/hoping to find others.” The cadence of the poem’s lines seem to echo the speaker’s walking pace, disappointed, but steadily trudging forward with some hope.
Sophisticated word-play is at work in the title’s double meaning: REDress is also redress, a process that should be woven into the fabric of reconciliation, and into the awareness of Canada’s citizens. The speaker, “now sixty” sees the terrible irony of her own life as “one/of the ‘lucky ones’/raped never murdered/only parts of me are missing”. Her care and concern are now for the young and vulnerable, at so much risk with cynical and mercenary “porn producers….so many bus stops truck stops with one-way tickets.”
Bereft families are left “to drag rivers in Winnipeg/while others walk highways of tears” and feel the missing spirits, their arms as empty as the red dresses that flutter in the breeze, empty as the cars, roadsides and balconies, empty as the promises of redress.
In Canada, where an Indigenous woman is six times as likely as a non-Indigenous woman to be murdered, REDress is a call for justice, accountability, and concrete action across the land.
*The REDress Project resides at Winnipeg’s Museum of Human Rights, but the annual honouring of the MMIWG now occurs across the country with installations of red dresses in museums, art galleries, parks, roadsides and public gathering places across Canada. Red dresses sway and flutter in the wind “to evoke a presence by the making of absence” (Jaime Black). Private advocacy is also shown by red dresses in gardens, driveways, balconies, and on those citizens who wear red to show support.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.”