The Martha Landscapes

Donalee Moulton-Barrett was a writer and editor in Halifax.

Reading The Martha Landscapes, by Colleen Thibaudeau, is like playing Trivial Pursuit; it’s fashionable, but there’s not a lot to it.

Most of Thibaudeau’s poetry is narrow and superficial. She’s trying to be avant garde and she fails, especially in the poems that rhyme. Take, for example, “Janet’s Postcard from Brazil”: “Janet’s postcard from Brazil goes /hand to hand as the sender intended, intending /no ending in sending to those /well-wishers and stay-at-homes.” The poem reads like a children’s book, perhaps intentionally; even worse, it’s boring (definitely unintentional).

However, the main problem with the collection is its trivialness, its emptiness. Thibaudeau simply doesn’t go deep enough into her own self, or the language, to produce anything substantial.

In the very first poem in the book, Thibaudeau starts off strongly: “Last night I dreamed about you all under the Star Over the House Quilt; /I remember mother making it: the little squares of jonquil window lit /The doors, shutters often green. Your block still has the hollyhock (french knots)...” But the poem ends weakly, predictably, and sentimentally with these lines: “And she licked the blood from roofs, sidewalks, from the small yards /with the ever-blooming trees pointing to the stars /of the Star Over the House Quilt.”

Thibaudeau sustains her images and metaphor throughout this poem, and most of the others (in fact, she often overdoes it) but the words don’t have any depth. That may be because Thibaudeau hasn’t really thought — deeply — about what she wants to say. It shows.