Salmon Courage

G. Sheldon Fischer was a Toronto-based editor.

If no one listens and cries

is it still poetry...

Thus Ms. Philip opens her book about, as the cover blurb says, “courage, traditions and change.” I would add, suffering and overcoming it. Battling odds with the legendary courage of the salmon (as we commonly anthropomorphize it) is a motif throughout this collection, whether it be the courage to survive broken relationships or to fight for social change. The pivotal poem, with the same name as the book, uses the imagery of courage and recurring life cycles explicitly. The poet’s mother

her way upstream, uphill; spurned

all but the challenge of gravity,

answered the silent call of the moon

danced to the drag and pull of the

coming back to “the spawning /grounds of knotted dreams,” both literally (returning to their Jamaican homeland) and figuratively.

The opening poems, although full of “violent silence” (“The Grammar of Love”) and “an ocean of silence” (“A Habit of Angels”) are restrained. But following the poem already quoted, they become more animated. In “St. Clair Ave. West” the poet “trades” her history of slavery and racial oppression with a survivor of the Holocaust whom she meets in a fabric shop. “You Can’t Push Now” combines the painful pushing of child-birth and the desperate “push” of Third World peoples for independence and dignity, in what I think is the most effective piece in the book. Several other poems carry on the theme of coming through to a rebirth.

The writing is not without flaws. Some of the poet’s attempts at satire sound trite, and her habit of using the interrogative in a poem is an annoying stylistic tic.

Nevertheless, this short collection (her second) is an example of what can happen when cultures mix. Marlene Philip’s Jamaican background gives her a fresh perspective on Canadian reality. Her writing is innovative, energetic, and, at moments, passionate.