The "Patricia" Album and Other Poems

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

The most distinctive feature of Colleen Thibaudeau’s latest volume is
its formal experimentation, which is especially evident in the
photographs that accompany each page of text in the title section.
Thibaudeau also experiments with voice, for example, by shifting from
the perspective of a male Afro-American slave who escaped to freedom in
Canada, to a medley of soldiers engaged in 20th-century wars. In another
kind of experimentation, she directs the reading of a poem with the
title “Going Straight Across the Lines Then Down Each Column Till
It’s Finished.”

What remains a constant in the volume is the realism of language and
imagery. While the captions at times contain descriptive or interpretive
commentary, they are always condensed or “minimalist” (to quote the
poet’s own description of her style in the endnotes). The minimalist
description and accompanying commentary is exemplified in the following
excerpt from the title section, “The ‘Patricia’ Album,” which
comprises pictures taken in 1915 of an anonymous group of people on
summer holidays somewhere in Ontario: “the wind has lashed small
leaves and twigs off the trees / and strewn them randomly. / There is
something sad in this picture / as if someone were going away.”

The mixed media work well in this series of poems by intriguing the
reader with questions. Is the speaker part of the holiday group? Does a
narrative develop? Thibaudeau answers some questions in the endnotes,
but she also includes unanswered queries in the photo album itself.
“Do you recognize any of these?” “Would you recognize the
chaperon?” “[W]as it really like that, peaceful? I am wondering.”
The speaker’s interest in—even affection for—the anonymous holiday
group becomes curiously infectious.