Mixed Messages

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library at
the University of Alberta.

Judith Lapadat is a writer from northern British Columbia who writes
highly personal poems that present the North as a site of intense
loneliness and of wild and exceptional beauty. The collection covers
much territory: the aftermath of a husband’s suicide, the vibrant
landscape of the B.C. interior, an affair with a married man. Overall,
the book reads like a collection that has been written over much time,
and the poems therefore feel more dispersed than focused. The first
section, “Mixed Messages #1,” includes a number of pieces that seem
to have been placed there because there was no other logical place for
them.

The section “In Memoriam” is a series of poems about a husband’s
suicide and what the family is left to deal with. The best poems in this
suite use metaphor and tightly contained language to imply the intense
emotion that is overwhelming the family, as in “rot”: “children
stretched tight / and bright over silent decay / clawing at each
other’s eyes / when you look away.” However, several of these poems,
while clearly presenting raw grief, use language that itself is both
predictable and too raw, and thus diminishes the experiences they are
communicating.

Lapadat’s strongest works draw on her skill as a painter, exploring
the North as place. In the section “Points North,” she works to fuse
language into landscape. In the poem “Valley of My Childhood,” she
notes the uncontainability of the northern wilderness: “Ragged edges.
/ … Knee-deep weeds run up the ditch / claw crumbles of blacktop. /
… With a stranger’s eyes I see / this secondary highway /
tar-patched by men in pavement trucks / losing against the bush. /
Ephemeral, / my home. / Pop machines and parking lots / a temporary
dream. / River, rocks, trees, and weeds / resist / persist.”

While she has written some poems of a political nature (about September
11 and globalization), more interesting are the works that illustrate
the politics of a life lived by a single mother in the northern
interior, in a country where much of the southern population still sees
much of Canada as uninhabitable.