Swimming out of History: New and Selected Poems

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University.

Time is among McNeil’s recurring subjects in this book, as the
“history” of the title suggests, and to make the abstraction
concrete she returns often to images of photographs, particularly those
of her grandparents and their generation. Perhaps the verisimilitude and
exact rendering of detail possible in the medium of photography is
achieved in these poems as well, along with a distancing suggested by
still photos neatly framed. But McNeil’s poetry can also transform
history and time through recording in metaphor the paradox of nature as
life-giving and life-destroying. In those poems that transcend
photographic realism, McNeil’s voice—always both intelligent and
musical—becomes less coolly distant, never intimate or playful.

In the poem entitled “Time,” the speaker watches a couple with a
new baby and imagines how the baby “one day / will stare at his odd /
wrinkled parents / with a sudden pang / of startled pity.” While the
speaker herself stares at her parents and grandparents throughout this
volume, she does not feel pity; rather she comes to terms with her
“odd” grandparents when looking through an old photo album. Once
“embarrassing people flawed with serious accents / who lived with
untidy dogs,” now, in her reverie, they seem kind, capable, and
energetic. Time can thus bring surprises of disorientation as well as
reorientation. Elsewhere the speaker confesses to a “secret file /
containing all the old people / I couldn’t bear / to think about.”

On the other side of the orderly progress of time and its tidy
containment in language stands her lover, “looking at me as if I were
/ still here / you being arms and lips / and feelings / which are not /
metaphorical.” Other poems celebrate “some common well / that pivots
at the centre / of a life.” And a world of “violence / florid and
beautiful” exists to an artist such as Emily Carr, celebrated in a
section of poems named for her. Thus McNeil’s perfectly cadenced
poetic voice acknowledges realities it cannot quite express.