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Signature Editions, 2002
ISBN: 0921833857
96 PAGES
* Shortlisted for the A.M. Klein QWF Poetry Award *
ABOUT THE BOOK
Loosely based on the author's own three-year experience in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, Snow Formations takes a realistic look at the modern Inuit world through post-industrial eyes, always walking the fine line between idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. Steeped in contradiction, this is Canada's North with all its trappings: igloos and pool halls, raw meat and radio, dogsleds and diapers. The North may be great and white, but it is not always pretty.
Snow Formations began as a thirteen-minute commission for the CBC Radio series "Home and Away," featuring new work by five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective.
COMMENTARY / REVIEWS
“Here is no poetry of alphabet games, but the inimitable lyricism of real imagination and emotions truly felt. These verbs reverberate, these nouns name names. Love and life achieve their maximum beauty in these pages. Carolyn Marie Souaid is the compleat poet, one whose voice continues to sing in the mind and heart long after reading. Hear her here.”
–George Elliott Clarke
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“Carolyn Marie Souaid has a dark and powerful voice.”
– P.K. Page
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" Souaid is passionate about the physical beauty of nature. She wants us to notice "the Earth's exquisite intricacies...Victorian lace./Spiderwebs. the organza wing/ of a common fly" so that we too can appreciate the scrap-yard world of the north, an "old brown woman in mukluks/and mismatched clothes embellishing the days/with colourful yarn." The relationship of the modern Inuit world juxtaposed with the "strapping, white, freshness" of the landscape is a bracing one.
The poems, like "snow formations," tell about the hard-edged life of the North. It's in this title-section, containing the bulk of the poems, that Souaid's voice comes across best.
In The Student, a poem in eight parts, Souaid makes us uncomfortable with a student-teacher relationship. Part 5 is particularly unnerving, the "student" and his teacher/lover out hunting. The student makes a kill, with Souaid superimposing the "thatch of blood" in the snow with lust and love - a raw realism even where there is romance.
Souaid can smack you in the face, sting you with the unexpected: he floats off to sleep until the abrupt noise of his own fart startles him to life... Seven years later, he cocks a .22 and blows the ocean through his ears.
...but Souaid pushes us to answer her unanswerable questions. In the Elder, Souaid asks: Outside her window, it is always the same plodding horizon. If this is her story, how can I tell it?"
—The Montreal Gazette
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"Both the mood and method of St. Lambert, Quebec poet Carolyn Marie Souaid's Snow Formations , her third collection, are entirely different. Based on her experiences teaching in northern Quebec, it features pared-down, imagistic intensity and an ironic tone. The first section, pre-departure, conveys her boredom and lack of fulfillment. Then comes her flight north: "my fissured, brown/liver-spotted towns/vaporized in the dark air/and when I woke, the world had accumulated again/ outside my window/ the strapping, white, freshness of it/ shoveling life/back into my eyes."
Of course, this is a familiar ritual (reject civilization, reclaim the senses in an encounter with the Natives and Nature). But Souaid is no sentimentalist; wary of easy answers, she's as cautionary as she is celebratory about the North and Inuit life.
The images are particularly vivid—and unsettling—when she writes of the natural world. "Cabin Fever" evokes a feeling of menace as winter closes in ("the grey void of water, /the one wrong slip to certain death..the cold shoulder/ of snow against the door, the house"). Elsewhere, she writes of the solstice: "Earth suddenly sped up a notch while/ Hades breathed deeply from the night between the rocks."
In one poem, Souaid invites the reader to "feed on the world,/one breath at a time." That invitation is made compelling by these vivid, brooding poems."
—The Toronto Star
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Excerpts of a review by Bert Almon
for the Montreal Review of Books
(Winter 2003-2004)
Carolyn Souaid's book is deeply involved with the Canadian North, specifically the Ungava coast, where she spent three years as a teacher. She daringly modernizes an important Inuit story in a set of poems, "Sedna: An Inuit Myth (Appropriated)," and the protagonist of the title sequence transgresses boundaries by falling in love with a 17-year- old boy. Souaid has skill enough to justify her audacity. Her Sedna is brilliantly conceived as a mythical deity and as a contemporary woman impatient with foolish men. In "Evening with the Shaman," Sedna has a man over for a dinner date and puts John Coltrane on the stereo. The poem switches between northern myth and contemporary practices: the predatory man " eyes her layered red cache," but she offers him a heart of lettuce. When he tries to seduce her, she figuratively entangles him in her snake-like hair. The narrator's comment is "Go, girl." In the finest poem in the sequence, "Stars," questions of fate are probed through images of stars, hands, and cards. The poem recalls the famous scene in which Sedna's father tries to save himself from a storm by throwing his daughter overboard and has to sever her clinging fingers by smashing them with a paddle. Souaid's refracts that story into a scene in SoHo with a gypsy fortuneteller dealing cards. The poem confidently brings together images of hands (Sedna's father with the paddle, Sedna's hands, the gypsy's hands revealing or at least controlling fate) and stars, bringing the images together brilliantly in the fortune telling scene: "My sweating palms made stars." The conjunction of images is an unexpected felicity. The Sedna poems are cultural appropriation, yes, but T. S. Eliot said that bad poets borrow, good poets steal.
If Souaid appropriates a myth in the "Sedna" poems, the narrator of the "Snow Formations" sequence longs to appropriate a person, a teenaged Inuit boy. The narrative was inspired by a news story about a school teacher involved with a student. Souaid manages to make this romance believable and moving, without excusing the element of exploitation, which the narrator says was mutual. And in telling the story she evokes the harshness and beauty of the North, and the moods of despair and boredom (cabin fever gets two poems) it can generate. Souaid's North is sometimes squalid, with garbage-filled moraines and damp tents, but she does the people the courtesy of writing honestly, not sentimentally. One of the finest poems is "Inukshuk," spoken by one of those cairns in human form which serve as markers in the almost featureless Arctic landscape. The cairn, which says it has been standing since the time of the Vikings, is a symbol of the edgy woman who narrates the love poems:
Let me tell you about the stone
will. How even through the
poignant light of softer days
I go on, standing.
Visibly intact. Touch me,
and I fall apart.
... The Arctic poems teem with metaphors, like the sea creatures that the myth says were generated from Sedna's severed fingers. The other poems sometimes editorialize about modern times and are dotted with rhetorical questions. Souaid's Arctic voice doesn't ask, it tells, with eloquence and colour.
EXCERPTS
SYMPOSIUM
We handed them God on a silver platter.
Do you know it took Him only one day to annihilate
the past? Which, of course, allowed them
to start over again.
In a flash,
He gave them light and a place to gather:
Pool halls and greasy shacks.
The world sugared white.
We took up the slack.
Served up their heart's desire: Export A
and an excuse to get up in the morning.
Vinegar on fries. Cameras to seize the day:
Dogs coveting cigarette butts,
An Elder's rotten keyboard of teeth.
We gave them mercantile lust
and the cunning
to turn 4,000 savage years
into art.
See that sky up there? That was us, too.
We gave them television,
liberalism, tampons, Pampers,
Pop tarts, tooth paste, acne, tartrazine.
Did I mention Sugar-pops? Xanthan gum,
Hubba Bubba, Boy George,
Ringo, Paul, John, and Love, all they needed.
With protection (which, of course, they still won't use).
The rest just came: Woodstock, Hollywood, the World
Wide Web.
The nerve of them saying we stole their land.
Such a small thing.
*
THE TROUBLE WITH BEING DEAD
It's the ones walking around you have to worry about.
All flash and strut, but no
heart. Dried-up corn for eyes.
Those dead sleep a long time, midnight stuffing
its black straw into their skulls.
Any one of them will tell you the same thing:
Life falls away in blotches, whole bits at a time
blanking out, like a puzzle
unpiecing itself. Withering into a prairie
for scarecrows, tattered half-men with nothing to do
but scratch around the blueless dark.
And if they'd chosen another path?
Sunnier and more passionate. An ear for the inner voices
talking to them, the tingling air
along the spine.
Just for a moment, imagine
giving into your lust, your sequined pangs.
Joy. Acute jags of glass in the wrist.
The trouble with being dead is what you miss:
tin-cold lakewater. The cashmere feel
of a last blurt of blood down the chin.
What you end up settling for: life
as a balance sheet, friends who are either
assets or liabilities.
How that peony in a jar of water
might as well be the wad of fuzz in a senile brain.
For all the impact it has.
