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Book review: Local poet invokes family in study of the natural world

Late Moon By Pamela Porter Ronsdale Press, 122 pp., $15.95 CANDACEFERTILE Saanich resident Pamela Porter makes a bit of departure with her new collection of poetry, Late Moon.
Late Moon

By Pamela Porter

Ronsdale Press, 122 pp., $15.95

CANDACEFERTILE

Saanich resident Pamela Porter makes a bit of departure with her new collection of poetry, Late Moon. Like her mentors, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, Porter is committed to the short lyric poem, but Late Moon also works on the mystery of Porter’s paternity, along with how she feels about the subject. In an afterword, the poet explains that she has imagined her biological father. Porter’s mother died without ever identifying him.

The book is divided into five parts, each with 10 to 12 poems. While the poems are discrete entities, they do tend to blur a bit because of the subject matter. Porter creates a subtle narrative arc over the pages, which deepens an already arresting topic, and the accessible language opens the anguish in the poems to a wide array of readers. Imagery of the moon appears in several poems, a fitting celestial symbol that shed some light, but not enough and that is in constant flux. In My Questions Go Unanswered, Porter imagines herself as a searching child and her father as a lost young man. And she is the adult attempting to understand their relationship:

Where is God tonight, the one / who made love so difficult, our lives / filled with estrangement?

Religious, or perhaps spiritual, queries infiltrate many of the poems, and a key figure is the minister with whom Porter’s mother had an affair. He is only one of many men in her mother’s life, and it would be no surprise if another book comes out about Porter’s conflicted feelings regarding her. The conventional Christian image of God the father is strong in these poems, and Porter brilliantly plays that image against that of the human father.

Porter herself appears to find god in the natural world. In In Both My Hands, Porter refers to both of her fathers, her biological one and her “adoptive” one, as she calls him, and specifies their differences:

One wrapped his losses and lived. / One folded up his joys and died / both alive in me / along with the wild animal / who is God.

That the natural world enfolds us all is fitting in these poems, some of which touch on Porter’s mother’s desire and need, as Porter imagines them. Her world is tangible and pulses with life, filled with family, animals, religious allusion, trees, waves, the moon. It is a rich and beautiful world, even if the mystery of her identity lies at its centre.

Acknowledging the grace of the natural world is certainly one way Porter copes with her questions. The other way is poetry. As she writes in Poetry:

Poetry sat up in me / And sang her evensong / promising we could tell the truth / she and I, / promising we could tell everything.

Evidently, poetry is a path, if not to salvation, then at least to solace. And Porter makes that path a strong and clear one. With precise line lengths and spacing, judicious use of repetition, parallelism and splendid imagery, Porter grapples with a basic human question — who am I? — and manages to transcend the particular to create nuanced questions for all readers.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College.