
Canadian poet Rosemary Griebel
PLACES TO LOOK FOR A MOTHER for Joan Shillington After your mother’s death I wanted to tell you, grief makes you a traveler in the foreign territory of every day. Look for her in small places: the pure loneliness of early morning; the hollows alongside animal trails leading to salt; where the Milky Way touches the darkness. You will want to talk to her as you fold empty clothes into a garbage bag. Speak. Later, the aroma of cloves and you will be peeling apples when she calls your name through the clicks of a warming stove. Listen. She is telling you all that’s gone is not lost. Rosemary Griebel from Yes., Frontenac House, 2011
I picked up the full-length poetry collection Yes. by Calgary-based poet Rosemary Griebel, a few weeks ago . Read through it for the first time in three or four years. I was dumbfounded by the emotional resonance is so many of the poems. Images as delicate as rice paper yet strong enough to hold the sorrows of a life – the death of a mother, of a brother – and even stronger: able to bring such an isness of what has gone as to bring it back through the alchemy of words, into a hope that somewhere, somehow what is gone is not lost.
Griebel’s images and metaphors are sure footed on the page. Confident with a knowing that comes only from the inside out. The poem writing the writer not the other way around. Like this line from her elegiac poem Tell Me: I didn’t know the hollow bones of the heart break like small twigs. And these lines: Tell me the mystery is not the light but how it passes through us./ How sorrow is like birds that life, resettle and one day are gone./ You wanted to stay. Tell me that.
I’m not sure how had I let Griebel’s poems disappear from reach but I’m glad they were just a book shelf away, that I had not lost them! Then I wondered how many poems, books, have I let vanish from my life, like this, in my chasing after the next latest book?
Which poems come back? Which books? Twigs, small branches, leaves in a stream, or bigger, a river. Passed then gone. The small beauty. Silver flash, water moves, shifts. A tremor lit up by light and something more, something other, perhaps. Memory allows the stream, the river to stop. The twig or branch retrieved. Remembered. Let go. Remembered.
As every metaphor does, this one breaks. I lose it. But I know where it began. All the poems and books and poems I have read. Glimpsed for a minute than gone. But some I find again. A book shelf is not a river. At first glance, none of the flashing movement. Beauty as transient, momentary. But look! A book can be retrieved and inside poems can flash and move, white pages, a river of sorts as they open and close.
Today I am on retreat at Honeymoon Bay on Lake Cowichan, near Duncan on Vancouver Island. A group of us led by Canadian poet Jan Zwicky – our theme: Writing and Environmental Witness. We began with a discussion of hope at a moment when we may be on an irreversible course to environmental catastrophe. How do we write in the shadow of that reality. What hope written against this can be anything but false?
What I left that discussion with was the unshakeable conviction that all I can do is stay awake, pay attention and celebrate the beauty still here even as so much vanishes every day. My job as a poet, as a writer. To see the beauty, sometimes even in the harsh or difficult things. The way Rosemary Griebel sees:
WHAT IS HOLY The white pages of a book. The many ways a hand can open and close. The brief darkness of a plane in front of the sun, lives suspended overhead. The way plants eat light – that is holy. The endless voice of the ocean. The streets of early morning when lone lights shine from the windows of the elderly. The eyes of someone who has lost love. It is in the breath and gathers into small sounds: bread, home, yes. When you bite into an apple and taste rain. That is. Rosemary Griebel, ibid
7 Comments
Wonderful to read Rosemary’s poems and to have met her at one of the Honeymoon Bay Retreats where you and I like to hang out! Glad to hear the Honeymoon Bay tradition continues with Jan Zwicky.
I don’t post very often
but these poems particularly touched me.
Thanks for your site, Richard. I read it! just don’t tell you.
Mary
Bless you Mary. Glad these touched you. Perhaps the mother poem in particular?
Rosemary, your work is so tender it brings tears to my eyes. What it must be like to live inside such a mind. Thank you for your beautiful poems.
Heidi
Thanks for the comment Heidi. Rosemary has a way with images that quite undoes me!
Just discovered your site, and love the poetry.
Rosemary Grieble’s is esp. moving.
Thanks so much Eileen. I feel lucky to have met Rosemary and her poetry. Such a fine poet.