Personal Luggage

Maggie Helwig was a freelance writer and Professor of Pre-Industrial Arts, UPRPU, Peterborough, Ontario.

Personal Luggage is the first book of poetry published by Marlene Cookshaw of Vancouver; but it reveals a style and sensibility already mature. Both the short prose pieces that make up the first section of the book and the poems that follow are powerful, spare, and tense.

The material is, indeed, “personal”; in one aspect, almost inaccessible. We read of bizarre incidents that seem to have some unspoken history behind them; people are referred to by name, cryptically, as if we should know them. Yet the net result is almost impersonal, almost distanced. Stretched between these two points, we are admitted partway into an unfamiliar mythology.

It is often a frightening one. The strangest image in Personal Luggage is that of entrapment, things closing in. Men and women are trapped in ambiguous, triangular relationships, “caught in the birdcage brass.” The poet may “fold napkins in the shape of peacock,” while a dark woman tells a fair one how “I dreamed you murdered your children,” but the dream seems the more powerful; and the woman who begins to walk barefoot into the night is driven back by a howling dog. “She wakes blinded: /her own arm across her eyes.”

It is to be hoped that Marlene Cookshaw’s own vision will survive and will continue to be articulated in poems like these.