Drawing Down a Daughter.

Kim Fahner is a poet and the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

Claire Harris’s collection, a narrative spiderweb of storytelling, poetry, journals, memories, history, and short story, Drawing Down a Daughter, is compelling. A poet of Trinidadian origins, Harris writes of the movement to Canada, of the contrast between the heat of the Caribbean and the cold of Calgary’s winters. Set against that cultural landscape, Harris writes of pregnancy, and of how that state must certainly link a woman to her past, to her own genealogy. There are reflections of how daughters relate to mothers and fathers, and of how expectant mothers dream and wonder about how this child, this new person, will embody its genetic memory.

The speaker writes the piece for her daughter, the unborn child who “slides into kicks out again again again / a wish to be free / shape that is not shape wisp in / the corner,” causing her mother to hope that her “girlchild” will find “something to be passionate / about someone to be passionate with” in her lifetime. There is such a natural wish for a child to find herself, her identity and soul, in the experience she will have as she grows up. As the poet writes of her time of waiting to give birth, there is also a real sense that she also waits for words to find their births on her page. There is a nice flow to this parallelism that weaves itself throughout the collection.

The cultural aspect of this book is obvious, with a child remembering how she listened “to steelbands playing Beethoven” as she fell asleep in Trinidad. In contrast, Calgary becomes a character of sorts, as the poet writes about how the memory of Caribbean heat and flowers shifts and becomes a new place, how “from the rim / of this escarpment working class / houses iced with snow hike toward / the Bow pines dusted sparkling.”

What would make Harris’s work even more compelling would be her voice, speaking the words out loud. For now, though, the words on the page speak for themselves with a rhythmic and clear voice, leaving the reader wanting more of the poet’s work.