The Journals of Susanna Moodie

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

This reproduction of a work that was originally published in 1980, in a
limited edition of 120 copies, brings to the attention of a wider public
a remarkable association that began in the mid-1960s, when poet Margaret
Atwood and painter Charles Pachter collaborated on five limited-edition
handmade books. The Atwood-Pachter partnership brought into Canada the
tradition of the livre d’artiste, wherein the artist contributes
original graphic work to a text, as opposed to illustrating it in the
literal sense.

Carol Shields has characterized Susanna Moodie, that most reluctant of
Canada’s early pioneers, as “a Crusoe baffled by her own heated
imagination, the dislocated immigrant who never fully accepts or rejects
her adopted country.” An excellent foreword by David Staines sheds
light on the historical Susanna Moodie, on her portrayal as “a
schizoid personality” in Atwood’s classic poems, and on the
Atwood-Pachter collaboration in the context of the livre d’artiste. In
the memoir that follows, Pachter traces the evolution of that
collaboration and provides a detailed picture of his artistic
techniques.

The balance of the work is a stunning marriage of text and art.
Pachter’s eerie, dissonant, and always compelling serigraphs give
brilliant expression to the poetry’s fundamental concern with human
dislocation. As Staines writes, Pachter “remakes as strange and new
[Canada’s] familiar iconography.” Particularly disquieting are his
visual interpretations of “The Wereman,” “Death of a Young Son by
Drowning,” and “Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age.”

In the final poem, “A Bus Along St. Clair: December,” a resurrected
Susanna Moodie turns up in modern-day Toronto (“I am the old woman /
sitting across from you on the bus”). The accompanying
image—Moodie’s haunted face suspended in blackness—perfectly
captures the horrifying absence of context indicated in the poem’s
final lines: “Turn, look down: / there is no city; / this is the
centre of a forest / your place is empty.”