Signature Editions

Snow Formations

About the book
About the author
Excerpt

Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award

Weary of her humdrum existence, a woman packs up and heads for Arctic Quebec, where she hopes to find a new lease on life teaching native children. She quickly discovers, however, that the Inuit have far more to teach her than she, them, as she slowly learns that each day on this earth is a rich sensory experience, not merely to be lived, but savoured. Loosely based on the author's own three-year experience in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, Snow Formations takes a realistic look at the modern Inuit world through post-industrial eyes, always walking the fine line between idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. Steeped in contradiction, this is Canada's North with all its trappings: igloos and pool halls, raw meat and radio, dogsleds and diapers. The North may be great and white, but it is not always pretty. Snow Formations began as a thirteen-minute commission for the CBC Radio series "Home and Away," featuring new work by five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective.

Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the "theatre" of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.

Symposium

We handed them God on a silver platter.
Do you know it took Him only one day to annihilate
the past? Which, of course, allowed them
to start over again.

In a flash,

He gave them light and a place to gather:
Pool halls and greasy shacks.
The world sugared white.

We took up the slack.

Served up their heart's desire: Export A
and an excuse to get up in the morning.
Vinegar on fries. Cameras to seize the day:

Dogs coveting cigarette butts,
An Elder's rotten keyboard of teeth.

We gave them mercantile lust
and the cunning
to turn 4,000 savage years
into art.

See that sky up there? That was us, too.

We gave them television,
liberalism, tampons, Pampers,
Pop tarts, tooth paste, acne, tartrazine.
Did I mention Sugar-pops? Xanthan gum,
Hubba Bubba, Boy George,
Ringo, Paul, John, and Love, all they needed.
With protection (which, of course, they still won't use).
The rest just came: Woodstock, Hollywood, the World
Wide Web.

The nerve of them saying we stole their land.
Such a small thing.

The Trouble with Being Dead

It's the ones walking around you have to worry about.
All flash and strut, but no
heart. Dried-up corn for eyes.
Those dead sleep a long time, midnight stuffing
its black straw into their skulls.

Any one of them will tell you the same thing:
Life falls away in blotches, whole bits at a time
blanking out, like a puzzle
unpiecing itself. Withering into a prairie
for scarecrows, tattered half-men with nothing to do
but scratch around the blueless dark.

And if they'd chosen another path?
Sunnier and more passionate. An ear for the inner voices
talking to them, the tingling air
along the spine.

Just for a moment, imagine
giving into your lust, your sequined pangs.
Joy. Acute jags of glass in the wrist.

The trouble with being dead is what you miss:
tin-cold lakewater. The cashmere feel
of a last blurt of blood down the chin.
What you end up settling for: life
as a balance sheet, friends who are either
assets or liabilities.

How that peony in a jar of water
might as well be the wad of fuzz in a senile brain.

For all the impact it has.