The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Gregory Scofield describes his work as survival poetry and it would be
hard to find a better term for it. He writes out of Métis experience
(he provides a glossary of Cree terms) and creates a world of
displacement and deprivation. But the aim is healing, regeneration, and,
after a mythic prologue about the medicine wheel (with a Cree
translation), the book is divided into four sections—“West /
Arrival,” “North / Searching,” “East / Dreams,” and “South /
Healing”—corresponding to quadrants of the medicine wheel. The
dominant tone of the book is angry, and the poet sees much to be angry
about in the situation of Métis in the city. The style of the poems is
minimalist: sharp staccato statements, with strong images and colloquial
diction—the language of the streets heightened into poetry. In the
long run, whatever Margaret Atwood might say, survival is not enough,
austerity of technique is not enough, but a number of the poems in this
striking collection indicate that this poet is on the way to something
richer. The final poem, “The Spirits Have Been Working,” is a step
on that way: a regenerative vision, but not a glib one.