Colour of Winter Air

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

This is a collection of poems that reflects a woman’s emotions of
dissatisfaction, victimization, and frustration as a result of her
personal relationships and experiences. It is a bleak, sobering book,
but does win through to a hard, new awareness.

The transformation of emotions is portrayed by recurring images and
not, as the reader might expect, through development of the sections in
the book. Many of the poems present images of fish and teeth. In the
title poem Landale writes, “A fish twists from the seiner’s forestay
/ cloth indigo swimming in air / Sometimes I see a woman dancing / long
skirts divided, wind extending arms / hooked, desperate.” The fish is
representative of a woman and of her emptiness as a result of a man’s
victimization of her.

The image of teeth covers a range of emotion, from the savagery of both
victimizer and defender, to resignation at the social, financial, and
gender inequalities life holds. In “Being Interpreted: The Ten
Commandments”: “Rock cracks with age, teeth wear out. / You brush
them viciously.” Toward the end of the poem Landale sounds a note of
envy: “What you lust shamelessly after / is your friend’s dental
plan.”

In the last poem—titled “Jocelyn age three and a half, comes into
my office with her new dolly”—the images of fish and teeth unite to
register a new awareness. Little Jocelyn and her doll Marie-Nicole
“play we’re remora fish, marie-nicole / swimming in and out of
sharks’ mouths / picking all the old dead bits out / we are being
quiet, mumma / marie-nicole is just bouncing / on your teeth.” The
mother is still fish, but no longer a victim; in fact as shark she is in
a position to become the victimizer. The poignant truth expressed
through the image of the remora fish/daughter/doll is that the
relationships must be symbiotic, reciprocal—each has needs that only
the other can fulfill.

Landale writes with power, and in this collection, she largely writes
with pain as well. Perhaps in the future she will bring her power to
bear on a wider range of human experience.