Bear Bones and Feathers

Description

130 pages
$9.95
ISBN 1-55050-055-4
DDC C811'.54

Publisher

Year

1994

Contributor

Reviewed by Edward L. Edmonds

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

Review

This book introduces the reader to specific phraseology in a language
that some thought existed only in spoken usage. But Cree, like
Mi’kmaq, is an agglutinative, highly inflected language, and Halfe has
wisely provided a glossary of parallel terminology whereby the diligent
can savor the nuances of both English and Cree.

The stanza “Morning Song” is a refreshing aubade. In these poems,
the author reflects on different phases of her earlier life. Her
scathing comments on the residential school to which she was sent have
an all-too-familiar ring. It is chastening to think that the
boarding-school world, still so successful elsewhere, could go so
grievously awry in the Indian aboriginals’ case, simply because it
overlooked that tenacious attachment they had (and still have) to a
deeply rooted way of life, to familial bonding, to traditional spiritual
values.

All this belongingness is portrayed in Halfe’s poems, which are by
turns tender, bitter, saucy, light-hearted, earthy. The only poems a
reader may feel uncomfortable with are those wherein she adopts,
presumably for comic effect, a “deep South” mimicry (specifically,
she substitutes the consonant d for the voiced phonemic th). Some of the
poems in this collection have appeared in magazines and anthologies.

Citation

Halfe, Louise., “Bear Bones and Feathers,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed December 4, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/1505.