South of the Tudo Bem Café

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

Early in their careers Margaret Laurence, Robert Bringhurst, Janet
Turner Hospital, and Jan Conn each wrote a book filled with images of a
tropical country. In poetry, where comparisons can be very subjective,
Conn’s South of the Tudo Bem Cafe is particularly vivid and poignant.
If one has travelled in those climates as well as in Canada and looks
for writing that is accurate and without deceit, Conn writes with the
best.

There are four sections to this book: “A Tapestry,” “With You or
Without You,” “Part of the Larger Darkness,” and “Estrella
Azul.” Appended is a two-page Notes and Glossary that defines some of
the plants, animals, and idioms used in the poems. This gives the book a
sense of exactness and detachment that contrasts with the pain and tone
in many poems.

Initially, Conn describes a family—its movements, reprisals, deaths,
and secrets. The first poems are inward journeys for the poet and
fragments of family history. In one, the relationship between a brother
and a sister is compressed into a phrase that is both coy and intimate,
a phrase that suggests both honesty and evasion. Some poems contain
dreamlike sequences, where time and memory are fluid. Events in the
poet’s life, for example, are described as being “dreamed into
existence” by her great-grandfather. These poems are also about
memory, and the ways that an enquiring mind continually reshapes it. As
in the poem “Sosa Hill,” Conn repeatably says to the reader,
“Nothing is ever that simple.”

A major component of the success of these poems is due to their
descriptive power. A person looks over a graveyard: “. . . I suddenly
see a patch of orange lilies / by the fence near the lake’s edge, the
ones / he would have told me to look for. The ones / breaking into
flames.” The lassitude of place and the riot of colors is described:
“We stroll down an alley of diminishing / perspectives. A dog runs
huge loping circles / around a woman wearing pink, a red hibiscus /
tucked into her hair.”

The final half of the book is set largely in Latin America, as the
speaker in the poems drives onward, questing for strength and a sense of
herself in the landscape she inhabits. There is an interplay between
displaced people and the country they find themselves in. The words
jostle for the right weight and the right metaphor as Conn becomes a bit
self-conscious in “Exposure” and “Icebergs on the Rio Doradas,”
but even with the passing of time the writing is good and her fire and
ice is still there.