Halfling Spring: An Internet Romance

by Joanne Arnott, Leo Yerxa (Illustrator)

In Halfling spring, a series of notes unfolds the dance of desire versus trust through a long season of actual and metaphorical springtime. Joanne Arnott is a Metis/mixed blood mother of six, and in this collection she continues her explorations of love, intimacy, and family, with a focus on electronic connections (internet love). Transiting Canada from Victoria to Iqaluit, and transitioning from virtual to real (fantasy to reality), she inspects the realms of miscegenation and love in a class conscious and cross-cultural context, revealing en route the many ways that our deepest connections unveil the depths of old pain. Optimistic and playful, romantic and mythic, affirming embodiment, this process of poetic revelation shows all the dirty tricks of love.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Canada

127 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2014

Reviews

[Dennis Bolen · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the subject of ultimate human connection this book explores and exploits an extensive inventory of routes to the amour-matter of the world in what amounts to a journey to the centre of the heart. 'Halfling Spring: an internet romance' is Joanne Arnott's sixth book of verse. It concerns itself almost entirely with the inner controversy and vagary of emotion involving that beating pumper of essential fluid within the human breast. One of the glories of this book is that heights of affection are expressed in so many ways—tactile, figurative, metaphorical—without the use of a certain word...that one with four letters starting with l, ending with e and involving the use of an 'o' and a 'v':

'she washes you gently from head to toe...

she takes out your heart
she takes out your brain
she bathes them tenderly
she asks, do you want these back?

you say yes to the brain
about the heart, you are unsure'

Amid the ethereal there are forays into the empirical that seem to exist in the book as place marks for our real selves, with acute observational detail: 'imagine that the icefields of the world/are a suit of clothes/the earth has lived in long on long, and/all of the animals, cultures, people who know/the ice as solid home/are about to be shirked...' Halfling Spring is filled with such visually precarious delights, mixing the visceral with the metaphysical, conveyed amid our unfolding understanding of social media, to create indelible mind impressions.