Poems for a New World

Melanie Marttila is a Sudbury-based freelance writer and writing
consultant.

Connie Fife’s latest collection invites readers to reflect on the
impact we have on our fellow human beings and on our environment. It
includes several prayerful tributes to natural beauty and the emotions
it evokes. If nature is not the impetus for the poetic moment, then it
figures prominently in its resolution in such poems as “At the
Lake,” “Mt. Douglas Beach,” and “Navigating a Storm.”

Fife’s treatment of the environment is nuanced. In “Can You,” the
poet asks if we can hear the ocean despite the fact that it is “lost
in the drumming of the city’s heart / trampled by the countless
footfalls of negligence / speaking in almost extinct dialects.” In
abusing the environment, Fife implies, we are abusing ourselves.

Fife takes us to the heart of social and domestic injustice. She writes
of the Oka crisis, the Gustafson Lake standoff, and the shooting of
Connie Jacobs and her son by the police when she refused to give her
children to social services. In “The Docks,” she states that she has
“no song” to describe or bring justice to “human cargo smuggled”
into Vancouver. “Peace Is Not Genocide” is her response to the NATO
bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, but her words could be applied to
more recent international events.

Poems for a New World is “a bowl of ripened poems / with which to
ease our hunger.”