Michael Goodfellow’s poetry speaks volumes of the folklore and underlying mysteries of his home province of Nova Scotia. With a powerful and sometimes evocative sense of what is and was, this poet is a storyteller in verse, an age-old art that has been passed down over the generations of many Nova Scotians. Inspired by the annotated collections and studies of Nova Scotian folklorist, Helen Creighton (1899 – 1989), and the natural and ghostly epic history that surrounds him, Goodfellow reflects a sombre yet vibrant perspective.

Goodfellow’s choice of Helen Creighton’s work prompts his exploration of stories, folklore, and, yes, ghosts—many of which were fragmentary: “As in the museum, the labels name what they were if not where precisely they were found.” Labels—is that all that remains? His response to Creighton’s work is exemplary as he writes from the outside, taking in the outdoor nature of the world that inspired both Creighton’s and his own work.

The collection is divided into two sections: “Topologies” and “Revenants.” “Topologies” explores the mathematical concepts of shape as Goodfellow’s words bend and redefine the geometric object: “the shapes split open without forming a whole. / Water flattened against our shape.” The second section, “Revenants,” denotes the impression that one returns after the dead, like a ghost: “When was something rotted enough / to be no longer dead, / for snow to be ghost of soil. / All a ghost had to do / was move through dust / for you to see what it was.”

Goodfellow uses a variety of poetic forms, from narrative melodramatic elegies to free verse and couplets, all with a remarkable power of expression and indomitable use of language. Within every form vibrates a story: “You made up stories for what we were. / Later you wrote them down. / They became myth. Then, how you lived.” And the grand finale of every story is the death of the last person to share it: “Only when the story ends / will dirt hold, / ghost take a wood form, / become a thing that eats ground. Now / water drains in drought / after drought.” As the title reveals, “drought” becomes the metaphor for endings, especially the endings of a good ghost story.

The lyrics of Goodfellow’s poems reflect the unexplainable and the supernatural, all in the well-crafted Nova Scotian storytelling tradition. His poems explore the landscape, folklore, and the fantastical surrealism of dreams and nightmares. Goodfellow obviously enjoys the power of the ghost story, as ghosts predominate so much of his lyricism: “The dead stayed buried in their earth floor / but the tree held the names of their past tense, / their years in bark.”

This collection presents a strong sense of physicality. The poems are handcrafted, hewn like a sculptor would carve from stone or wood. Goodfellow’s poems are wistful and almost fanciful in their folklore offerings. His works are minimalist in his simplicity and focus on the essential theme of folkloric ghosts and lives past lived. His minimalist use of words defines his attraction to the natural beauty of what was and could still be. “True stories are haunted. Dried.”