why isn't everybody dancing

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

why isn’t everybody dancing is more a long poem in five sections than
a collection of poems. It opens in mourning for the speaker’s
daughter, Lani. Evocative short pieces weave recollections of the young
woman with descriptions of birds, flowers, and rain, culminating in a
haunting description of scattering her ashes in a vast northern bog. But
references to the island of Bermuda even in this first part foreshadow
the way why isn’t . . . opens up in subsequent parts.

Section two, “slave wall,” juxtaposes documents from slavery in
Bermuda (posters describing runaways, a slaveowner’s will) with
descriptions of the island’s slave walls, testimonies from the trials
and executions of witches, and traditional rhymes and charms. Even more
than the speaker, the slaves and witches of this section suffered,
grieved, and mourned; recalling them provides a wider-than-personal
context for the speaker’s grief.

With section three, “poems out of exile,” interconnections between
the speaker, as a white woman from the First World, and Bermuda are
placed in the wider context of colonialism over time. She describes her
grandmother using blueing made from tropical indigo; a contemporary
tourist in “a silk shirt stars and stripes and dollar bills”; and
the “gentleman Trott,” who, 100 years before, walled a fishing pool
to prevent poaching, enterprisingly charging admission instead.

The rioting that followed the execution of two black cadre
anticolonialists in Bermuda in 1978 is central to section four, “soul
fire / black star.” Haas uses docudrama/radio script techniques of
juxtaposing the comments of citizens with those of a shopkeeper, radio
announcers, a librarian, a tourist, a preacher, and a human-rights
activist.

After journeying into these wider contexts, Haas comes back in the
final section of the poem “where / healing / the broken circle / joins
itself.” “Are we not all / joined in bondage still / bearing the
weight of love / and its loss,” she asks as the book closes.