Blue in This Country
by Zoë Landale
reviews
“This is great poetry, confident, controlled, informed by place, embracing the universe.”
Prairie Fire
“. . . her work is a breath of fresh air. West Coast air.”
Pottersfield Portfolio
“Zoë Landale’s new collection, Blue in This Country, offers an intensely metaphorical statement of the power of poetry to transform the landscape of our lives. Ultimately, it is the grace of Landale’s language that constitutes the foundation of her affirmation and gives us ‘Something / to catch hold of. . .” University of Toronto Press
“Good poetry makes the everyday resonant. This is good poetry.”
UBC Alumni Magazine
“Zoë Landale is the female counterpart of Robert Lowell.”
Canadian Poetry
excerpts from the book
Blue in this Country is only Temporary
We think the old shapes of growth
are used up,
that a single crow cannot fly and be significant
against a mountain escarpment
its black shape seeming the same size
as the hazed green
that shoulders 1,500 feet
against the sun.
That’s tired, people say despairingly.
We say this because soldiers shoot children
in Mexico.
We say this because the crow,
its scissoring of air, its belonging
to the horizontal plane of breath above us
does not acknowledge suffering.
We believe that potency has gone from old
myths, but no one has ever told the firs this.
Or Stellar’s jays, those thieving
paradigms of blue,
or the northwesterly that sweeps up
afternoons on this long lake chain.
The “we” who says this
is our stripped-of-magic selves
the we who believe in price tags
and the abandonment
of the old for some richer gratification.
New wives, new families, exotic myths
from some far country
made into sweat shirts
with gold and purple designs.
Cant hose without language be said to know?
Ask the wild strawberry and it will
feed you with red words.
Ask the rock
and it will show you sharp edges of young mountains
or palm-size rocks, grey and insignificant.
It will be up to you to solve
the koan: any one of the stones
was here before our ancestors had names.
Ask the sky what to believe
and it will tell you that blue in this country is only
temporary, that clouds are is soft vanity.
It will tell you silver falls down
mountains for years, that bears have green eyes
in the dark, it will confuse you
but belief has many answers.
Whether you accept them is another matter,
though it doesn’t matter to the crow
who is in fact Crow, a solitary reflective shape
out of a black vast
handful of her kind,
or to the firs, who are one exultant form
with different trunks.
And the children? Place them in prayer
soft as wings, the comfort and clean smell of sky,
vast as Mountain with its roots going down
to prehistory or eternity where magna stirs slowly
says Hello
I may surprise you yet.
Housewifery
I have allowed my days
to grow swollen
as caulifowers.
They dangle like distorted skulls
at the end of each arm.
There’s a trick to handling these
white days
I haven’t yet found.
Too many details:
graininess of laundry,
the kitchen floor muddy
again.
I want my rooms
bare as a Japanese house,
elegant as bone.
As clean.
My family will be home at any moment.
They will mess things up.
Again.
I am prepared for the chaos they trail
in their wake,
earth in the grooves of their shoes.
The baby with her sharp intakes
of delight, of Ooo as she grabs at drawers.
Only part of me
wants to scour my way
to a closed universe
a house where gleaming skulls
will smile from the mantel
dustless forever.
David and his Father at Calgary Airport
David is webbing the world,
invisibly,
casting out from his father
who sits in a black plastic chair
in the Calgary airport.
His father watches his sixteen-mont-old son
with the slight, crucified smile
of a man
unable to believe
his own happiness.
David, cheeks red-chapped,
rocks
as he walks the lines
out from his father’s bearded
sanctuary.
Today he wears his green jumpsuit,
with one red arm, one blue.
He moves with the solemn walk
of the fat-diapered.
Fifty feet away and David
turns. Back.
His father’s heart is a spiked fish
in his chest,
flopping.
The pure gaze of his boy.
The sharp Aa of joy that David gives
on finding
that same face
safe at the centre
again.
Almost all the way
back, the boy turns
in a different direction.
The father lets him
go.
David is weaving.
The word is not one he knows,
not hot nor head nor shoe,
but the imperative is there, to tread
certainty through his feet
into this strange place
with the people, the noise,
the slippery tile floor.
David’s mouth is open.
He stagger-runs into the sparkly
air, making pathways.
What leads away
leads back, that is the delight
that keeps him stomping
and balanced
at the end of the delicate rotation
about his father,
the axis.
Aa, David shouts when his father keeps
reappearing.
The father laughs, just a little,
as his son
keeps reeling him in.
