Counterpane: Poems and Drawings

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

Montreal painter Catherine Bates has a sensitive, well-trained eye, and her attention to detail fills this first book of poems. Whether she is writing about a lonely rose, a hospital room, or an alley cat, Bates lets an aspect of the thing represent the whole. Her poems are like detailed petit-points: vibrant colours stitched into complex images.

Many of the poems in Counterpane are about man’s relationship with nature, and it’s here that Bates is the most visual. Her poetic landscapes are more than just striking, they are sometimes troubling and mysterious as well. In “Window at Wynford Eagle,” Bates writes:

Grasstops fill with ripening seed,

budding thistle stems bend stiffly,

bushes, branches group with gusts,

just outside my window.

Like an artist framing an image in her mind, Bates keeps nature at an uneasy distance in her poems — just outside her window. She seems to want to keep nature under control: to her a rose is something to be plucked and put in a “Glass jam jar to grace the long-polished planks” of the dinner table. Most of the drawings in this collection are still-lifes of flowers — the beauty of nature confined in vases.

But Bates is less strict when she writes about people. Her emotions sometimes stumble over one another and her intentions are not always clear in the poems about her dying mother, but Bates writes with such compassion that these are tiny faults.

Counterpane is filled with poems that appear at first to be merely interesting ideas and images, but that later take on deeper, darker importance. They’re like the shimmering red quilt on the book’s cover; at first you don’t notice the troubling purple patches.