What I Remember From My Time on Earth

REVIEW in ARC – by Mary Dalton

In What I Remember From My Time On Earth Patricia Young continues explorations begun in earlier books – of eros, of the mysterious zone of the family, of the shifting and dissolving boundaries between the human and other forms of life (landscapes, animals), of the atavistic currents rippling within the seemingly ordered and orderly. What characterizes this latest collection is the increased complexity of these explorations, in rendering the “the fantastic distance between heaven and earth,” (‘The Meteroron’), the “ . . . journey . . . bodies take/deeper and deeper towards a beginning/where they recognize nothing,/not even themselves” (‘In the Hotel Room’).

The poems are at once rich and spare. And they call out to each other, across and within the three sections that make up the book. A questions that speaks itself in the various weavings and echoes is this: how are we to see our human journey on this earth, from the perspective of the heavens, as in “Wheeling through Tuscany” and “Letter in Flight” or from the perspective of the excavator, the one focused on the subterranean, as in “Seismic Activity” or “Pompeii.” An ascent or a decent? The question forms itself in terms of time as well as space in the book. Remembering or desiring?

Young makes the fragile moment palpable, fraught with memory and desire. One of the book’s many strengths is the way in which small family occasions – in, say, “The Game” or “The Fire” – exist at once in their ordinariness and as part of the vast sweep of time and space. Family upheavals such as death and separation are also seen form this dual perspective.

Throughout the book there is a sense of the power and pull of forces beyond human knowing. The human journey is in seeking to apprehend the mystery, to see ourselves grounded and to unearth ourselves, as in “The Place Where Souls Meet’: “They say there are moments/when even the untrained eye can see beyond/memory into some other dimension/where heaven and earth give up/their secrets . . ..” In the third section of this book suffused with pain, the poems seem to move towards a kind of acceptance and forgiveness, an affirmation of “perfect/animal grace,” reflected in the haunting poem “Our Lives Together as a Small Green Book,” in the fusion of the story of the lovers and the bees making their “embroideries of gold.” What made and unmade the lovers was “something/inarticulate as the ether.”

That “something” is rendered often through the creation of little narratives that are somehow fractured or skewed, frequently by the surreal. Sometimes the narrative all but disappears, as in the question “Can symbols alone tell a story?” The broken narrative – the pull towards and away from narrative – is one of the ways in which this book enacts it themes.

So much more: the celebration of eros; the ecological vision; the occasionally wry humour; the ease with abstraction as with image; the quiet music of the free verse. What I remember form my time on earth is a beautiful book.

REVIEW IN VANCOUVER SUN: The Naked Truth About Humanity’s Life on Earth by Susan Musgrave

Once a writer reaches a certain status, that is, wins a lot of big awards, it’s easy for other writers – who may even be famous prize-winning writers themselves – to grow envious.

This is Gore Vidal’s “it’s not enough that I succeed – everyone else must fail” syndrome. (For a very funny take on writers and competitiveness see the chapter called “Jealousy” in Anne Lamott’s “Instructions on Writing and life,” Bird by Bird).

Patricia Young is a popular poet, and a poet’s poet too. With the number of awards she chalked up so early in her career she could have turned us all into green-eyed monsters. Each book she publishes outshines the last, and while one may read her words jealously, too, no one seems to begrudge her making off with all the accolades. I’ve even heard writers admit she deserves them.

What I Remember From My Time On Earth is a difficult books to pin down – one slender volume that occupies an enormous emotional space.

The poet’s carefully-chosen words often belong to several of the senses at once, as if each word had eyes, ears and tongue, fingers, a body to move with through visible and invisible worlds.

There is beauty in the way she handles each line, her choice of images – her sensuous descriptions involving fruit, for instance. In “The Summer the Marriage Comes Apart” two mangoes and a jug of ice water sit beside the bed. In “Wheeling Through Tuscany” the poet travels through a “wet-grape darkness”.

Elsewhere bodies smell of ginger root and limes, words are peeling from another’s tongue like rind from a freshly picked melons, and a lover’s brain is described as “the beautiful cantaloupe ripening beneath your skull.”

How much better she can get than What I Remember From My Time on Earth is hard to imagine. It’s almost as if, here, she is looking back on her life from some other-wordly place, alert to this world, alive with objectivity, at grips with language.

In “Pompeii” the poet writes, “I have lost you in a portico where lovers once lay/side by side facing the mountain,” as she climbs staircases leading to winged women carrying shields: “with every step my feet remember catastrophe’s weight.”

The square is noisy with hawkers, the raucous
voices of moneychangers, but it is your breath
I want among the ruined columns.
This morning the Antiquarium is free of tourists.
I observe the casts of bodies, search
the saloons backwards the way I read a book,
from right to left, knowing truth shows itself
in hollows: a young woman lying face down,
a dog twisting on its chain.

The poem is so full of resonance that it deserves to be, dare I say, carved in stone? Young moves in and out of time and worlds, never flagging or faltering and takes the reader with her.

There have always been days of justice and injustice,
the human heart on trial. If you’ve passed through
the House of Gladiators there’s no sign. Not even
a circus fighter’s helmet rolls over the grass.
Last night in the hotel room we pushed the narrow beds together.
Almost two thousand years since a world was obliterated
beneath pumice-stone and ash and still
your fingers are legible on my skin.

She ends the poem, too, at exactly the right moment:

Our time together will end too soon.
This is why I have searched the buried city:
there are ways of being we have not unearthed.

In “The Origins of the Kiss” she takes us back to Semitic antiquity, “beyond Africa and its asexual wild grasses, wonders if it was the terrible kiss of God that caused the virgins of Central Russia to lose consciousness and turn into dock leaves.

In “Crows Apology” she is flying over a rhododendron forest when a voice tells her, “You are Crow,” and she descends into petty thievery, stealing hubcaps, jewellery, brass buttons – anything that glitters. “You see what you want/ and though it’s not yours/you swoop upon it.”

Often it’s as if her poems come to us through an ancient medium, one that is still living today, has never died, has seen it all come and go, and has remained ageless.

“In the Museum the Hominid Speaks to Her Lover” is another poem where Patricia Young brings the passage of millions of years into a clear perspective: the poem has a sweet sense of nostalgia and longing so that the reader feels herself travelling, upright, part of a small band, onto the savannah, or digging nuts in the shadow of Rusinga Island and climbing into a moss-laden hagenia tree at night, to sleep and dream.

These are poems that meditate on human connectedness and estrangement, on our human need to communicate and understand one another, the small intimacies as in “Shaky News” where the poet watches the rituals her daughter, terrified of earthquakes, performs every night before going to bed – and our larger rituals, our dying and death.

On the inside front cover it’s suggested that if this book were sealed in a time capsule and launched into space, it would be all any future readers would need to understand the nature of human beings – naked and alone, as we are, and have been – on earth.

“Think about it,” Young concludes in her poem call “House” “there’s something touching/about anything naked.”

QUILL AND QUIRE: What I Remember from My Time on Earth

Reviewed by Theresa Shea (August 1997 issue)

What I Remember From My Time on Earth follows four years after Patricia Young’s Governor General’s Award nomination for More Watery Still. In this new collection, the seventh from the Victoria writer, Young turns her poetic sensibilities to a sustained and intimate meditation on human history.

Here, in the closing stanza of “Pompeii,” she ponders the fossilized human remains from the ancient Italian city and recognizes the randomness with which life can be extinguished:

Our time on earth will end too soon.
This is why I have searched the buried city:
there are ways of being we have not
unearthed.

Young’s poems repeatedly force the reader to reflect upon the necessity of communication, and encourage us to affirm life’s quiet but essential moments.

Perhaps the finest poem in this collection is “In the Museum the Hominid Speaks to Her Lover.” This lyrical monologue chronicles what the various experts and museum visitors believe to be the hominids’ habits, and ends with this lovely stanza:

What they cannot know: our dreams by
firelight,
digging nuts together in the shadow of
Rusinga Island.
Memories like the slow vanishing of seeds and
berries.
What they cannot know is that you and I
walked onto those sun-drenched plains hand
in hand.
That we often stopped to lie together
in the boulevards of grass that wove between
the trees, our kisses long and deep and oh my
special friend
how I have missed you these millions of years.

Speculations on the evolution of love and the undeserved gift of daily life recur throughout. But some of the poems, in their too-slack free verse, fail to rise off the page. Others, such as “A Strange and Terrible Thing” and the title poem, use surrealist techniques unsuccessfully.

Overall, though, the book is lyrical and sensitive. With an equal mix of intelligence, humour, and compassion, the poet travels from Pompeii, to the 17th century, to a historical investigation into “The Origins of the Kiss,” to contemporary musings on familial love, to the fear of present-day catastrophes.

Young confidently documents life’s small epiphanies – tender acts, simple yet graceful depictions of love and longing. As her poems illustrate, life is an endless excavation, and her words inspire the reader to a deeper and more rewarding archeology.