a review of Anne Le Dressay's Old Winter in the Prairie Fire Review of Books;

Old Winter
by Anne Le Dressay
Ottawa: Chaudiere Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9783428-0-7, 115 pp., $18 paper.

I last heard Anne Le Dressay read her poetry in the mid-nineties, at the Hellenic Hall in Edmonton. It was a gala night, the culmination of an annual festival of readings organized by the Edmonton Stroll of Poets Society. More than 200 listeners trained their eyes on the slight, black-clad poet on the stage, whose calm tone belied the shadowy intensity of her words. One could hear the proverbial pin drop. Considering that many of those present had never before attended a poetry reading, it was no small feat. Le Dressay's poems poked at unhealed wounds and teased old scars; they explored fear and hate, love and identity with both an admirable precision and lack of melodrama. Many of them appear in her first collection, Sleep Is a Country, published in 1997.

In Old Winter, Le Dressay's second collection, the poet still rummages in the shadows, but her voice is softer. In the introductory poem she calls herself "the laureate of small moments" (9), then plunges the reader into a myriad of such moments in the life of a girl born to a French-speaking family in Manitoba.

In a larger context, the life is quiet and unimportant, yet those "small moments" are as dramatic as any that occur in the world. The girl is born in the back seat of a car driven by her father in dense fog. The same father, and a neighour, carry school children on their backs across a swollen creek:

I could feel the tug of water against him, his resistance
a shudder through all his bones. In that shudder
I felt the water telling me what it would do
if I tried to cross alone: how it would take me
in a hundred hands, toss me from one to another
like a twig; how it would pull me down and under
slip its liquid fingers into my clothes, my boots, my lungs . . . (15)

A four-year-old child is killed when her eight-year-old brother overturns a tractor. A dangerous dog must be shot. A storm demolishes the farm and our girl and family move to an urban setting, outsiders from now on.

The fog is not so thick that light cannot penetrate it. A horse that belongs to a city family living in the village is not required to do anything but provide beauty during an annual parade. A new boy in school, temporary refugee from a spring flood, "dazzled, like the water world in sunlight" (28). During the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, in 1967, a car with South American licence plates brings smiles of wonder to the faces of locals.

How does the girl process all this? Alone, she tells us in "First Blood" (27). "Nobody to tell and no desire to tell. / Just another secret to absorb into the tangle / of secrets I held close, as if secrets meant / safety." This aloneness, which hovers on the edge of depression yet is not, becomes the book's theme. "(Grey with an e is not the same / colour as gray with an a. . . )" (30) we are told in a poignant poem about a much younger brother who has dropped away from the family.

The poems in this collection do not rely on linguistic fireworks, yet they have the ability to work themselves under the skin. Not much happens in "A small thing" (35). In the middle of a beautiful, empty countryside, mud clogs a girl's bicycle miles from home and she can neither ride it nor abandon it. She sees a car appear on the wooden bridge. Gripped by sudden fear, she imagines

a bad guy who wants to get you
under the bridge, and what do
you do? Only the fields and no houses.
Only the bush and the deep ditch
and the long grass and the mud.
Only the lonely spot on a lonely day
and you can't get home.

This particular man turns out to be a friendly neighbour and this particular girl gets home unscathed a few hours later, but I had to reread the poem a few times just to make sure.
I do have some complaints. The collection works as a whole, but the theme of loneliness, of living "in the margin of stories / more vividly coloured" (43) sometimes feels overemphasized. The poet also over-explains at times, the old "just in case you didn't get it" syndrome. The few poems where language tips from restraint into plain flatness: "To his mind, he is / opening my eyes to exciting / possibilities." (69) could have been left out of the book. Still, when Le Dressay is at her best, she is very good, and I wish I could once again hear her voice, and experience that attentive hush in a roomful of listeners savouring "Northern morning meditation," for example, a poem which lifts a winter bus ride to work to quietly pleasing heights.

Anna Mioduchowska is a poet, an author of translations, stories, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in anthologies, literary journals, in newspapers, on buses, and has been aired on the CBC Radio. In-Between Season, a poetry collection, was published by Rowan Books. Eyeing the Magpie is a collection of poetry and art, published last year in collaboration with 4 fellow poets.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

reprinted with permission;
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