Fiction and Poetry Reviews

J.C. Peters

Sage Island
by Samantha Warwick
Victoria, BC: Brindle and Glass, 2008
240 pp. $19:95

It's January in 1927, and young Savanna Mason is determined to be the first woman to cross the Catalina Channel near California in the chewing-gum sponsored Wrigley Ocean Marathon. The girl's got heart, to be sure, but she also has a past, as we quickly discover. The first-person narrative points mysteriously to episodes of lying on the floor staring at the ceiling for hours at a time, fears of "cracking up," a mysterious eye affliction, and an inability or unwillingness to talk with any of the other competitors, even the most helpful or even masculinely attractive. The story unfolds in flashbacks and we slowly piece together Savanna's story.

As it turns out, however, this story is less the melodramatic traumas of a victimized heroine, and more those of a hormonal teenage girl. Savanna was born into lower middle class mediocrity in her parents's "bake house," and, capitalizing on what her coach calls her "physical intelligence," she wants nothing more than to become something better than she is by swimming competitively. In what appears to be a lucky break, she is discovered by a rich backer (and his really cute son) who decides to sponsor her as the first woman to cross the English Channel. Savi gets a taste of how the better half lives, and immediately falls head over heels for her backer's gorgeous son, Teddy. Unfortunately, when her long-time rival, Gertrude Ederle, conquers the channel first (both in the story and in reality), Savi is dumped like an old wool swimsuit by both rich backer and cute son.

Traumatic to be sure, but one gets the sense our narrator is a little overly sensitive. The deep secrets alluded to in the first chapter turn out to be little more than a bad mix of hormones and excessive pride. The mysterious eye affliction, for example, turns out to be damage from a drunken night when Savi tried to incite herself to cry by putting onion halves over her eyes. Her feelings tend toward certain themes: when swimming, "excitement glowed in my centre and shivers crept through my bloodstream"; when complimented on her skills, the statement "lit a fire in my rib cage and sent tassels of electricity through my bloodstream"; the possibility of doing the swim "sent hot tiers of hope down my body"; comments from Teddy "sent small hailstorms down my vertebrae" and seeing him again ignites a "slim, crackling storm down my back." Young Savi might consider learning how and when to cool down or a nice cuppa joe might send her into fiery convulsions before she can take her first sip.

Compounding this hyperbole is Warwick's fondness for superfluous adjectives. If there's something to describe in a sentence, no matter how minor, she'll describe it. It's nice to know that an acquaintance's curls were short, that a table nearby was small, that the bench her friends are sitting on is soft, but it's not really necessary. Warwick also uses 1920s slang rather awkwardly in her dialogue, but not in Savi's first person narration, which makes words like "hoss" and "jip-fest" seem tacked on and awkward, contributing to the pacing issues.

Despite these stylistic bumps, Warwick's instinct for writing finally manifests itself in the chapter where Savi begins her channel swim. Warwick's prose becomes suddenly speedy, intense, and poetic, as if Warwick stopped trying to tell everything and began to show it instead. 15 hours into her ocean swim, Savi is going blind and crazy swimming through everything from seaweed to seals, and the narrative poetic surfaces:

My head pounds to the stroke count: one two one two one. This moon is my metronome. A full moon has influence over all the body's fluids. Conjures outrage and sudden hysteria. Never let the full moon shine directly on your face. [...] Numb numb numb. Numb: deprived of the power to feel or move. But I am moving. [...] Am I in a beautiful delerium? No. Dark and cold and boring, my bones are crumbling. [...] Onions and pearls, onions and pearls, onions and pearls, breathe. I hear music.

As her body deals with the pressure of swimming long distance in cold salt water, memories emerge, and her stream of consciousness recalls images and words from her past, her friends, her alcoholism, the onions on her eyes making her cry, and a pearl Teddy once gave her. Here we can see the concurrence between swimming and speech in the fluidity and rhythmic breath of this passage.
Sage Island is an interesting account of a female swimmer in the 1920s encountering issues of gender, athleticism, and class in that era. Despite the stylistic issues, Warwick has created a unique story and character that points to her great potential with this, her debut novel.

Letters I Didn't Write
by John MacKenzie
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2008
95 pp. $16.95

A collection of few words but incredible richness, John MacKenzie's new collections of lovely, lonely poems span topics that include a physics major's disillusionment, a country singer's romance with the bottle, and a grandmother's tears in Vernon River, Prince Edward Island, that are “not like a green mist, they are like rain." MacKenzie's poetic voices are many and varied, but the poetry always comes back to a vocabulary of “space,” “emptiness,” “distance,” and an indeterminate yearning, for love, for music, for peace, for the sun, for a happier past, a beautiful poem, or simply for human connection. All together, then, Letters I Didn't Write is blues poetry at its best.

The first, and arguably most powerful, section of the book is subtitled “The Moon Just Went Behind a Cloud (the lost Hank poems),” which are poems written either for or from the perspective of country singer Hank Williams. Each poem is short and sparse but so effective you'll feel so lonesome you could cry. The poems trace Hank's love affair with his music and his whiskey bottle until “the only thing real is this guitar.” Hank's loneliness is so intense it becomes bodily, and we listen as he makes “a xylophone from a ribcage,” trying to sing the loneliness out of his bones. If the reader is familiar with Williams's country blues, this collection will illuminate the dark heartbreak beneath his honky tonk. Even read without any musical accompaniment, these poems resonate deeply. There is a certain pleasure, though, to putting a record on and reading John's poems while Hank croons his blues into your living room.

Later poems are set squarely on the East Coast, where the ocean is powerful, the green moss thick, and the landscape a force that leaves its citizens cowering and alone under the cold moon. One such poem transposes a piece by Li Bai, a renowned Chinese poet from the 700s, into the voice of a nineteenth-century PEI woman who lost her love at sea and waits patiently for his perpetual return. Here, wine, loneliness and the great outdoors conspire with various personae speaking through the cold early days of spring.

Just as this loneliness is a part of the human condition, so is humour, and MacKenzie does not lose sight of the human comedy in all this human pain. Some short pieces say all they need to say:

These Grey Hairs?

Not from worry the moon won't return,
but one to count each time it has.

These poems neither despair nor edge into drama. Humour is never far away, and the little details give each poem a realistic bite.

The final section of the collection, subtitled “The Book of Hours” includes poems on the musings of a physics major who wants nothing more than to “talk about the algorithms of beauty” but receives only cold rationality from his professor. MacKenzie has written previously on the theme of the physics of beauty in his 2002 collection Shaken by Physics. It seems that the natural world, whether it be a spring moon, PEI moss growth, or the way molecules work together to create something new hold a magic and a mystery that may not be knowable, but can certainly be woven into a selection of poems about unknowability.

Inspired by country music singers, ancient poets from various countries, physics, astronomy, lemons, and the seasons, these poems cover a wide range of genres and ideas. Nevertheless, it is a remarkably coherent collection, returning in each section to ideas about loneliness, the moon, and the spiritual balm that wine can sometimes be. Certainly, then, in this blues poetry, MacKenzie mines the human experience to show that, for all that we're alone, at least we're alone together.