Signs of the Times

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

In this, Mitcham’s fourth book of poetry, she fashions in free verse a
collection of striking environmental images. They reveal the world of
nature (represented by the Native experience) and the world of white,
urban society (represented by science and technology and the
preoccupations that sustain it). Although a recurrent theme in her work,
the cultural and environmental dichotomies are not the only images in
Mitcham’s collection.

The clash of two cultures as well as the clash of humankind and nature
is represented in the metaphor of the “sign.” This is the subject of
a number of poems scattered throughout. A “sign” takes on many forms
in Mitcham’s work, from the smack of a beaver’s tail, to the
blossoms of fruit trees heralding a new season, to a far-flung northern
welcome “in three languages of my country.” Mitcham shapes a series
of concrete images that are pleasing, foreboding and powerful, grounded
in the words of a stark reality. The sense of the concrete comes through
in the title piece, where signs representing white society also reveal
its power, reminding everyone that Native society has been conquered.

Mitcham’s work begins with a paean to the suburban middle-class
tradition of the backyard barbecue in “Suburban Altars,” and ends
with the wish, in “Island Cemetery,” to be buried “far from the
smell of steaming asphalt / and the whine of intercity jets.” That her
collection ends with such a wish is certainly no accident. Mitcham
expresses herself best through nature, and it is from nature that her
hard, vivid images gain their life.