Snow Formations

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.

Carolyn Marie Souaid’s third book is a finely wrought exploration of
one woman’s journey to the Arctic and her slow discovery of life
there. Souaid based the sequence on the three years she spent as a
teacher in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, but she has turned
those experiences into a fragmented poetic fiction full of insight and
passion.

Following a series of poems about a life felt to be dead (or at least
dead-ended) in the South, Snow Formations turns to “Sedna: an Inuit
myth (appropriated).” That word in brackets carefully establishes both
her acknowledged distance from the Inuit experience of life and her
awareness that anything she does with what she learned there is a form
of appropriation, and all she can do is admit it. One way of working
within such an acknowledgement is to re-imagine the myth from an
outsider perspective, and this she does with empathy and compassion.

The long main title section of Snow Formations takes up the tale of the
young woman from the South’s encounters with the North and its people.
Souaid’s eye for the particular ironies of modern Inuit life,
especially the “gifts” of white “civilization,” is sharp. Old
and new clash in the images of the poems. As the woman falls into a
relationship with a young hunter, the poems take on a dramatic mystery.
At their best, they offer brilliant images of both the terrain and the
people who live so fully in it. There are some tart imagistic poems that
conjure up the landscape with stark beauty. And the love poems delve
into the workings of body and heart with subtle eroticism as imagery and
indirection do the real work.

The poems of return to the South carry a certain weight of sadness and
loss, yet also a sense of inevitability. Remembering will turn to
writing, and the poems already read are the necessary result of the
journey. Snow Formations is an intelligent and heartfelt work; the poems
speak with a satisfying honesty.