All That Saves Us

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English at Trinity Western
University in Langley, B.C.

Lea Harper’s first published collection of poetry comes endorsed by
Jack McClelland’s claim that she is “an exceptionally talented
writer ... few are like her.” There are lines in her volume that
suggest that this is indeed so. But as is often the case with first
collections, the writing is uneven and at times undisciplined.
Harper’s musical inclinations are clear, particularly in the narrative
mode that many of her poems follow, but the need for a
singer/interpreter of the lines is too often pressing. One imagines her
and her twin sister performing the pieces as they might have with their
group SYREN, an award-winning duo. The words on the page alone seem
unable to do justice to the need for an audience.

The poems are intensely personal, dealing with issues from Harper’s
difficult childhood, broken relationships, and various losses associated
with innocence and experience. There is no doubt that her writer’s
intelligence is deeply sensitive and alert to the cosmos it inhabits.
All That Saves Us confesses the horrors of human existence with sincere
cynicism, announcing in its capstone offering that “all images
converge / like rivers collapsing into foam / It’s like memorizing
sand / I love, you love / That doesn’t change / and is all that saves
us / from despair.”

There are moments in these poems when such clichés vanish in favor of
the potency of the language and its metaphors. Although the collection
depends heavily on an eclectic variety of allusions—Christian
mythology, the poetry and lives of such eccentrics as William Blake,
Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, and the ever-indulged Canadian
icon Leonard Cohen—it does not fall completely prey to this
dependency. When Harper speaks from experience rather than interpreting
it in relation to others, the imagery takes on a lingering and
satisfying pleasure of its own. Overall, the pieces offer too much
interpretation of themselves and/or experience that remains personal to
the speaker but would recover more poetic vision if it were
universalized as the stuff of life.