The Office Tower Tales.

Lynn R. Szabo is a chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

Winner of the prestigious Pat Lowther Memorial and Book Publishers Association of Alberta awards, The Office Tower Tales is the gold medal performance of Alice Majors’s poetic corpus. With a bow to Geoffrey Chaucer, Majors’s lengthy narrative records office coffee klatch as a postmodern epic of hope in the face of death from that most dreaded of all modern diseases—inconsequentiality. Its tales are spun from the ordinariness of the (dys)functionality of three women in their seemingly impotent spheres of influence in the Edmonton engineering firm where they toil.

Major has heroized these tales by giving them poetic heft and honouring the humanity of their tellers, even if not literally, as in the epics from which she has drawn their literary frame. As if in the ethos of a Greek myth, the three women meet daily for nine months eponymously as Aphrodite, Sheherazad, and Pandora during the time that Pandora awaits grandmotherhood. In their conversation, Major’s narrators offer her readers literary light with the craft and insight of mature female wisdom, courage, and erudition. In doing so, they bravely face male domination in the place of business and the devalued experiences of women’s work in childbirth, the care of the ill, the creation of community, and bearing of its fracture in their families. Their interior and exterior life stories are profound and life-generating, emotive and authentic.

In a series of prologues, tales, and epilogues, brilliant musicality and emotionally vertiginous imagery ironize the banality they seem to advertise. The five-line stanzas that the narrators’ voices serve shine with the meticulous crafting of words perfect to their purpose, offering a pilgrimage of their construction of meaning; the volume’s themes are epitomized in its afterword: “Touch me and touch this place … / where we construct our lines from the wordless / like windbreaks. Where we make the edge / bite like the knife that shapes the quill. /… Our letters take their shapes / from magpie flight … / … th[eir] teetering trail printed across sand / or snow. The path of record blurred / by baffling drifts, lacunae.”

In these lacunae, the magpie, as the talisman of the tales and the aptly selected book’s cover image, flies into our consciousness where its mimicry echoes our own female mythology. This volume is necessary to every library of women’s studies and Canadian poetry.