Taking the Names Down from the Hill

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

The subjects of the poems in this highly accomplished first book by
Philip Kevin Paul, a First Nations writer from Saanich, B.C., are often
people now lost to the writer (father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins,
and friends) but held in memory as part of a living tradition. They are
meditational narratives, full of moments seen clearly and distinctly.
Paul has a keen eye for the telling detail, as the few shorter
poems—which are almost imagist—demonstrate; but such details fill
out all the stories he tells.

As he says in a poem for his uncle Gabriel Bartleman, itself a story of
the stories he told, “stories marking what had changed / and what had
not” are centrally important; they are why “Saanich really is here /
and really here even now. / At these pages // where I’ve come to seek
perspective.” So in these poems, Paul seeks to make the place and its
people come alive in what he can recall of their own stories and his, as
he encountered them. In such tellings, the traditions come alive, so the
poems are full of movement, of talk, of love and gifts of the moment:
“If you were here / would the light busting / through the trees fall /
with a better mastery / of grace?”

To read through Taking the Names Down from the Hill is to encounter a
family, a tribe, a continuing life of the people even as the land
disappears: “What I imagined was my only home / lost forever under
tons of concrete / and vulgar electric houses humming. The sickness into
us.” But none of it is quite so lost, and the poems themselves tell us
why this is so: “[S]orrow has had its time. / The mourning must break
/ at last. I will tell you / what they really left us. / They left us /
magic, in everything.” Narrative meditations of real power, these
poems offer their readers such magic.