Northbound: Poems Selected and New

Carrie MacKinnon was a personnel officer for a large Toronto insurance company.

Leona Gom has achieved a central role in modern Canadian poetry — and especially Western Canadian and “mural” poetry — since her first book of poems was published in 1972. Northbound combines works from her first three (now out-of-print) books with new works, allowing the reader to see the development of both themes and style over more than a decade.

The publisher states that most of Gom’s poems are “an intensive exploration of the effects wrought upon the creative psyche and the creative process by remembered ancestral place, the leaving of it and the pervading influence of ensuing time.” While that claim may be overly intellectual, selling short the evocative power of much of Gom’s work, it does underline the central theme of leaving the land: the child of immigrants who gave their lives to tame the wilderness chooses the city, eagerly shaking free of the rural trappings, only to realize she never really can, and doesn’t really want to.

The first section includes poems from two early works, Kindling (1972) and The Singletree (1975). These poems are predominantly childlike — naive and simple — in focus, delivery, and morality. The farm and the land are portrayed as a source of both regeneration and wonderment for the child. She watches passively, perhaps learning early the power of nostalgia. Yet this innocence is tempered by the knowledge that the land is amoral and uncaring, “closing like a fist” as soon as you leave.

As the child grows, passivity changes to deliberate action in the face of the rural dream world. It is with the money that the last of the horses brings in the stockyard that her savings account begins, which allows her to leave. Almost, it seems, before she has left, she begins to question whether the lives fought and lost mean nothing, so quickly does the land reclaim the farm. Does the cycle of resurrection each spring mitigate that sense of loss, anger, and sorrow, or confirm it? The death of her father and the survival of her mother are vividly portrayed in “Widow,” conveying the fundamental sorrow almost too powerfully. Indeed, this first section is almost overwhelming in the intensity of emotion and response demanded of the reader, which results from the selection of “best poems” over a period of years.

The second section of the book is comprised of poems from Land of the Peace (1980), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award as the best book of poetry published in Canada in 1980. Ironically, as the author becomes more accepted and accomplished, the language is more consciously “poetic” and less evocative, more conscious of metaphors that intrude and distance rather than communicate, mirroring Gom’s distance from her land. The images have more geometry, less fluidity. Is this what being farther away from the land does? Is it living in cities or simply growing older that produces a more confused morality? In these poems, the farm is depicted as a no-man’s land, neither wilderness nor civilization, where people are driven mad by the isolation, the land, the weather. One senses that there is an essential frustration to the calling of the labeller, the symbol-maker, when “fact is impervious to symbol.”

Gom documents this process of journeying between lives lived in one or other extreme; the transition is transformation. The land, the farm, childhood opposite the adult, the city; she explores this impossible juxtaposition in a wonderful way: the scars of parenthood equal the scars of childhood, the burdensome, guilt-ridden sense of duty on both sides.

The third section of the work is comprised of new poems. On the whole they are neither as self-conscious as the middle section nor as powerfully evocative as the first section. Common themes persist, such as the guilt of alternatives not chosen. In “Nostalgia”:

The exploration continues; one looks forward to more collections and works, the balance of nostalgia and true awareness constantly shifting. Gom’s contribution to the Canadian poetry movement will continue to grow.