Taken

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Taken requires attention of the sort we expect to pay while reading
excellent poems. Who is “i” and who is “I”? Now we are in
Australia during World War II; then it’s Java at the same time, or
London, England; then it’s Vancouver Island during the Gulf so-called
War. “i” is the narrator, Suzanne. She wonders who her parents were
when she was a child. Taken is Suzanne’s effort to decipher “what
gets passed along in body tissue, without words. Not so much their
history even, but the ambiance of their lives, what they took for
granted, the smell, the feel of their time my own beginning
intercepted.”

Resonances abound. Suzanne’s reflections on censored televised images
of U.S. firepower in Iraq connect with her mother’s learning about the
1941–45 War in the Pacific from censored letters, newsreels, and radio
broadcasts. Her mother sorely misses Suzanne’s father, Charles, while
he is away at war; Suzanne tries to articulate the painful gulf between
her and her former lover. Sentences like the following are all too
common: “If the relationship of power between the individual in the
nation state, which underlies much current political philosophy, is
shifting as effective power is put in the hands of the multinationals to
which nations then become subject, then the strategies of individuals
responding to nation states become an important source of analogous
action for the nation state itself.”

The result is a book that states some interesting, if
difficult-to-access, observations.