Singing Rib

Brian Burch is a teacher, writer and poet and author of Still Under the
Thumb.

Among the very first books I ever reviewed were Some Breath and This is a List, books by Linda Rogers released in the mid-1970s. Even at that early stage of her development she showed an ability to examine the common and make it fantastic or the mythical and make it understandable. In Singing Rib, her most recent book, Rogers shows that she has matured as a writer and yet still has some of the same qualities that attracted me to her work over a decade ago.

Singing Rib is a revision of the Genesis story of how Eve was created from Adam’s rib, the second of two creation myths in Genesis. We see creation through the eyes of a modern woman, dealing with modern temptations and the roles of those seen as modern temptresses.

Each of her three sections deals with an aspect of the creation myth. The first, before the fall, shows both the freedom of innocence and the growing realization that there is evil around, a hidden darkness that can not be properly understood and grasped.

The second, The Fall, explores the hollow attractiveness of temptations and how by responding to them we are merely trying to find a way out of our own darkness. The response to temptation may not be a fabling away from perfection but the first step towards self-healing.

The third section deals with the time after the fall, the expulsion from Eden. Here temptation can again be looked at as the response to emptiness, the need to be filled with external meaning.

Linda Rogers is a powerful writer, one who cares about her craft and her content. In Singing Rib we are given an opportunity to explore one of the dominant myths that once moved our society and has fallen away in a manner that finds life in what some might see as a dead image. While not a dominant voice in Canadian literature, Rogers is surely a powerful one.