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My Nature
By Christine Lowther
Lantzville, BC: Leaf Press, 2010
112 pp. $17.95
Christine Lowther bears a famous surname – partly due to the infamous murder of her mother, Pat Lowther, a BC poet of increasing reputation at the time of her 1975 death. But, assuredly, the daughter is adding to the lustre of the name, thanks to her own shining poetry.
If her mother was concerned with feminist and post-colonial, democratic themes, the younger Lowther is passionate about the environment, a point underlined by the title of her new collection, My Nature. That word, “My,” also signals Lowther’s personal considerations. So, a love poem states, “you will not see / the flower shape of me / curved, curving, / bending to your will / you peel me away like ivy, / the vine that clings, a parasite, / but I merely yield, seek beauty / in flexibility / there is beauty / (I declare it) / in the torn shape of me.” “Lighten Up” works similarly, and draws on an epigraph from Lowther mater: “you know solitude only as you know the sea in a handful of water.”
The speaker notes, “After rolling me in your soft bed / you said ‘I want to be alone in my life.’” Immediately, she looks to nature for understanding of this moment: “the comforting splash of he kingfisher / brings death to the minnow / and there is after all so much to thank you for: / the balm of betrayal….”
This collection is a fine fusion of nature and human nature: “You had assumed you were alone. A raven croaks far away; /something splashes close by. / All around you, companionable: soundless spiders easy in their webs.”
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