Goodbyes Are Something

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

This is the first book of poems by Mattie Falworth, a Montreal writer and a teacher at Vanier College. Born in Texas in 1930, Falworth came to Canada in 1970. She is the founder of the Montreal Poets’ Information Exchange.

Goodbyes Are Something is a cycle of 26 poems chronicling the falling out of love and the divorce of the author from her husband. “Saying goodbye” to love is addressed in almost every poem: to Falworth’s credit she manages to exploit this slender theme to its fullest potential. She writes with tenderness about her loss; for the most part her elegiac poems avoid being maudlin. They are, however, infuriatingly claustrophobic, and smother the reader with a musty blanket of sorrow. “I liked Peter, Paul and Mary” and “I remember Ste. Catherine Street” come perilously close to greeting card sentiment, but the author’s steady hand and intelligence redeem the poems before it is too late.

The best poems are the ones in which Falworth detaches herself from her subject. The clarity and objectivity of “Glare ice,” “you took:” and “I have kept copies of deeds” allow the reader to breathe a little, and to see for himself the broken heart that propels the writer to share her words. Although these poems are essentially lists, they are powerful because of the author’s selectivity. Here she shows us the things that made up her life with her husband, rather than telling us how they make her feel. The poem that begins “False thaw made us hope for early spring” is also fine: the images of ice, snow, and cold (which are successfully employed in many of the poems) are clearly effective.

The poems are attractively laid out and the publication is well put together, although the cover design — a snowy wood — is as bland as the collection’s title.