Nina Berkhout mines the fodder of daily life for truths of the human condition, and offers them to us in her latest collection, The Great Wake. These are poems that at once bring a sense of mindfulness in the now, while highlighting the urgent reality of our mortality.
Each of the book’s four parts touches on both the human and natural worlds, and the fleeting nature of time. In the first pages these themes play out skillfully: an abandoned piano is an emblem of the past, a manufactured object that has reverted to nature. One can almost hear the faint notes of yesteryear: “The only musicians left are mice / who enter through pedals / as if grace notes climbing darkness, / lifting felt from hammers / for their home” (“Abandoned Piano”).
Berkhout plays with tension between the reality of the human condition and aspirations of freedom from it in various ways. In the whimsical “Fairytale Ride,” when garbage trucks descend on the neighbourhood, a hot air balloon with celebratory travellers rises above the chaos. The sounds are vivid, with resonant “clinks of champagne / flutes.” What follows is a carefree escape from reality, with the solidarity of the collective “we”: “and when the wind / picked up and a golden rope / dropped, we grabbed hold / without looking back on the refuse.” Just when the reader senses a getaway, another poem soon pulls us down to something as banal as buying bananas. Rueing the plastic trappings that cosset bananas these days, she relates: “This is what happens midlife. / We focus on small sufferings to avoid thinking / about the peeling away of oneself” (“Bananas”). The longing to escape the inevitability of our own mess, only to be confronted with it in the mundane chore of grocery shopping is humorously humbling.
The final section is perhaps the most affecting, as joy battles with melancholic acceptance. Meaning is found in the breathtaking surprise of spring in “A Chronic Condition” (“Besides, who doesn’t want to be / caught off guard at this time of year, / swaths of green coughing through / ice patches”); the frolic of a fox family; and a neighbour’s optimism in the face of decline. However, it’s Berkhout’s take on the stark reality of life’s conclusion that hit me straight in the chest. Life is a novel that will end, she writes in her final poem of the collection, “The Last Page”: “… I’m not ready // even though all along you suspected / what would happen to the protagonist / and to all your beloved characters.” It’s true and it’s magnificent, but these poems contain ideas that are not always easy to bear. This is the poet’s view from mid-life, balanced between hope and the approaching twilight.
There is so much quiet solace in The Great Wake, highlighting our precious, present moments in all their glory; but the urgency to live in the present is brought into sharp relief by tick-tick-tick of the passage of time that brings each of us closer to the end of our stories. These are beautiful, perilous poems that I highly recommend.
Bios
Trish Bowering
Trish Bowering lives in Vancouver, where she is immersed in reading, writing, and vegetable gardening. She has an undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Victoria, and obtained her M.D. from UBC. Now retired from her medical practice, she focuses on her love of all things literary. She blogs at TrishTalksBooks.com and reviews on Instagram@trishtalksbooks.