Nuage Editions, 1995

ISBN: 0921833431
80 PAGES


* Winner of the David McKeen Award *
* Shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Poetry Award *


ABOUT THE BOOK

Swimming into the Light is a sequence of poems charting a woman's struggle with infertility and her entry into motherhood through the back door of international adoption. The book traces these events in a connected narrative, from her frustration and despair over infertility to the uncertainty of international adoption and rescuing a new life from a war-torn country, and finally to the quiet reflections on motherhood. The French version, Fille au bord de l'eau (Écrits des Forges, 1998) by Marie Évangeline Arsenault, was shortlisted for the QWF Translation Award.



COMMENTARY / REVIEWS

"Written with a tough intelligence and a bracing earthiness, Swimming into the Light tells a poignant story that brings together three generations in the land of Souaid's ancestors. 'He's kind of an embodiment of both my future and my past,' Souaid said of her son, Alex, whom she, her husband and her mother travelled to Lebanon to adopt in 1992. The book, which is dedicated to Souaid's son, manages to graft the sensibility of a contemporary North American woman struggling with infertility to a delicate search for distant roots. Many of the poems have the quality of snapshots, capturing the Lebanon of a particular moment, as viewed by an outsider with more than a passing interest in what she sees." — The Montreal Gazette



"This is important new work which engages themes of fertility and female sexuality with candour and courage. Souaid writes a poetry to savour, as fresh, as unexpected in its textures and tensions as 'the marriage of gin and Juicy Fruit.'" —Mary di Michele



"Swimming into the Light travels from Canada to Lebanon, infertility to adoption, personal aridity to an oasis of plenitude. Souaid celebrates the life force which, one minute, destroys and in another leaves you gasping at its fecundity and embracing a child that 'hung like amber fruit in another woman's womb.' Her concern with roots, with continuity, extends to the social and political spheres as well, where even Beirut, that locus of destruction, begins to re-emerge, phoenix-like, from its ashes. Order, she says, sneaks up on you; and so it does in these fine poems, which are so quietly exact you scarcely notice their artistry until you feel the detonation deep inside." —Gary Geddes


EXCERPT


Infertility

There are shapes my body will never make --
the perfect O, for instance, that other women form
to expel the gleaming apricot head of a newborn

part of their own flesh & their lover's
part of their mother & father & generations
before them, swimming into the light

the whole universe from beginning to end
falling through them
like the sweet green rain.

 

Translation by Georges Abou-Hsab