Old Habits

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Rhona McAdam’s third book of verse is a very accessible collection.
Though she considers many subjects—love, hope, regret—the personal
wilderness of the traveller seems to be the most common theme. Her style
is smooth and familiar, her book a good companion for a long winter’s
evening by the fire.

The prairie (“Serpent of light ... coils in upon itself / holding
travellers to its face”) is one of her first venues, but she seems as
alienated there as in her later home in London. “Underground”
reduces the urban dwellers to the status of helpless moles: “we bore
deeper into earth together / accidental divers plunging / into
blackness.” Some of the chiaroscuro effects in “Neighbourhood”
recall Atwood: “Our neighbours are reduced / to pillows of light
through the trees. / Some of them are not even home, their lights /
obedient to timers; it could be no one watches with us from the darkened
windows: / it is a settlement of ghosts and we / are the last
outpost.” Other titles—such as “Wind,” “Insomnia Again,” and
“Waiting for End of the World”—reflect this loneliness.

Love seems to be no solution. The stranger abroad becomes the stranger
in a marriage, “both exiles now in the hearts of our own countries.”
The traveller settles in a thousand-year-old city that is a prairie of
the soul. Perhaps the answer lies in “The Boston School of Cooking
Cookbook,” the stained but loving pages of her mother’s record of a
life of purpose; “its leaves have pressed my mother’s memories in
perfect squares.”