The British Columbia Review, September 2024

Poems ‘about life, death, and between’

If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb
by Lorraine Gane

Salt Spring Island: Raven Chapbooks, 2024
$20.00 / 9781778160370

Reviewed by Mary Ann Moore

The title of the sequence and the chapbook of SĆUÁN (čuʔén)/Salt Spring Island resident Gane’s If I Have Known Beauty originates in Webb’s poem “Some Final Questions,” first published in 1965’s Naked Poems.

The book’s cover details refer to a blue peacock shawl worn by Webb during the launch of her final book, Peacock Blue, and given to Gane. Inside is “12 x 16 Series Green, 2002,” a full-colour reproduction of Webb’s acrylic on canvas. Webb played “a vital role” in Gane’s poetic and personal life; following her friend and mentor’s death, Gane (The Way the Light Enters) wrote ghazals in honour of her.

Webb sometimes wrote “anti ghazals,” as she called them when they broke the rules of the traditional form. Gane also veers from the traditional form on occasion. For instance, enjambment isn’t usually an aspect of the traditional ghazal. Each couplet is independent, so that the order can be changed according to a poet’s preference (or a reader’s, in fact).

Gane’s poems are impeccable in their crafting and are woven with memories of and advice from Gane’s beloved mentor of over twenty years.

Readers are gently invited into a deep, liminal, and mysterious realm—which is where Gane found herself following her friend’s death. The poems, Gane explains, seemed to be held in what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardos, a state of forty-nine days following death to rebirth.

The bardos is noted in “Elegy 3” as a place where Webb, the “you” of the poem, dwells for forty-nine days, “destination unknown.”

“Elegy 3” is the first of three, including 13 and 23, that refer to a line—“From the land of only what is” —in Webb’s “Leaning,” which appeared in Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals. While in a liminal realm, the speaker remembers the poetry of her mentor and listens to: “Your voice on phone messages I can’t erase.” The ghazal, made of five couplets, concludes with: “Incessant rain, the night sheds its dark tears; / I read your Vision Tree poems.”

Gane’s poems ask questions as she continues to receive good counsel through her mentor’s lines of poetry. The speaker of these elegies makes note of the earth’s changes and finds solace in the natural world. From “Elegy 6”: “In the forest earth soaks up the deluge, / white buttons poke through the moss.” And, from “Elegy 8”: “Light on water this morning, the creek aglow with alders.”

In “Elegy 8,” the speaker addresses the subject of her poems: “You’re weightless now, earthly burdens left in boxes / of books, paintings waiting in the wings.” Twelve days before Winter Solstice, the turning of the year, the speaker observes: “Half in this world and half in the other, / I wait in the spaces in between.” The poems share the speaker’s days and the state of the world, notably, in “Elegy 19,” with “the cold, panic / mounting in the fourth Covid wave.”

“And the great dreams pass on / to the common good” Webb wrote in “The Days of the Unicorns.” They’re the final words of “Elegy 24,” as the speaker warms herself with “your blue-and-purple wool scarf / scented with perfume.”

I can’t help but think that finding form for the early days of grief acts as a container in which words and images help one to bear witness while recalling Webb’s phrase of acceptance: “the land of only what is.”

 

BC BookWorld, SPRING 2021

Arc of Light by Lorraine Gane (Raven Chapbooks $20)

“They say I don’t have long to live,” Lorraine Gane’s mother tells her in the poem Death Dream about the start of a long conversation her mother, Mary begins near the end of her life.

“What can you say to the voice of death,” Gane wonders, which is answered with “I love you and a hug,” before her mother “sits down to cereal, milk, and her seven morning pills.”

Gane’s collection of poems, Arc of Light, an elegy to her mother, is bound together in an exquisitely produced chapbook by Salt Spring Island-based Raven Chapbooks. At times emotive, Gane’s writing is elegantly minimal and brutally honest.

We learn that Gane’s mother came to Canada as a poor emigre from Eastern Europe in The Girl from Poland. “Despite the strangeness of it all, you were happy,” writes Gane. When her mother comes of age, she marries at 23 and hides the “little girl” inside her heart along with “all her hopes that blossomed and withered there.”

Inevitably, end-of-life stories include bad health — in this case a stroke. While visiting her mother in the hospital, Gane is alarmed when Mary points at the window and says, “Look at that reindeer.” At first Gane doesn’t see the reindeer. Then, Gane bends down so that her face is next to her mother’s and sees etched in the glass, “a small figure with antlers flying into the light blue sky.” Her mother is relieved that Gane can also see the figure. “I’m glad, you say. I didn’t want you to think I was seeing things,” writes Gane of her mother’s response.

Back and forth between home and the hospital, Gane engages with her mother. Some of these moments are set against metaphors of animals as in The White Heron in which Gane watches a heron and its hatchling “lift off together” and “vanish into the blue air.”

Gane describes her mother’s last breath: “a final wisp of air that disappears into the silence she becomes.”

The final poem, which gives the book its title, is about a photo of her dead mother’s body in a bed over which Gane sees a white arc floating above. “Yesterday I looked at the photo again five years after her death,” writes Gane. “The arc was still floating above her — all softness and light.”

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