Skeena

by Sarah de Leeuw

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia’s second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, Skeena is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river’s perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than ninety pages, this second collection of poetry by award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw follows a Canadian tradition of long poems, weaving together poetic rendering of the river’s perceptions with archival material that includes highway signs and historical newspapers, scientific reports and local lore, geological surveys and tourist websites. Mirroring a river’s complex tributary structure and rendered in highly concentrated imagistic language and experimental description, Skeena is a poly-vocal watershed of poetry, a book that unflinchingly demands humans understand the power of a river, the life and world of the Skeena River.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2015

Reviews

[Ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before we had names
time was ice

de Leeuw tells the story of the Skeena River in northern British Columbia through a collection of poetry, news articles, and other historical records. 'Skeena' is one of those works best read in one setting as every piece is interconnected, each poem further developing the character of the river itself.

Rather than anthropomorphise The Skeena, de Leeuw seems to go out of her way to create something distinctly non-human in her characterization. In keeping with its nature, the Skeena is a force that observes and interacts with the life around and within it, but with detachment. It can feel something like sorrow, something like hunger, something like love, but not exactly. Not like we do. It doesn't really understand names and language, but indulges with a sort of baffled amusement and curiosity. The alienness she captures is almost uncanny in places.

The river at once relishes the fish that live in it, the refuse from the forest, a piece of claw a bear loses in a fight, the body of a squirrel that sink to the bottom. But it equally relishes the owlet and the moose that drown in it, bones snapping as they're dragged along in the current.

It watches humans build settlements and roads and bridges, feeling sorrowful when a bridge cuts it in half, but then a century before it swelled up and destroying an entire village, and a century later it destroys the roads.

I guess the lesson is that people can tame nature in some ways, but not in others, and not forever. And nature continues on regardless, finding a way through cracks and crannies. Maybe not right away, but eventually.

I'm not sure how true that is in reality, but over the course of its life in the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of years that we experience the Skeena grow and shrink and grow again, de Leeuw crafts a strong impression that it is.

The documents do a wonderful job contextualizing each set of poems, but the poetry itself is definitely what makes 'Skeena' memorable.

It's not a collection you could open and easily find a line with which to caption your nature shot on Instagram, but taken together she's created something truly magical.

Her employment of poetry to tell this story feels essential, and in reading it you realize the river couldn't speak any other language.

I enjoyed that, while definitely modern in construction, the poetry took many styles and certainly many forms.

I'm generally skeptical of poetry that zigzags around on the page, but de Leeuw convinced me she knew what she was doing. You get a real sense of the choppy water, the tide, the rain hitting the surface in the way she puts the words down. It doesn't always work perfectly, and not everyone is interested in the level of work it takes to keep reading in the correct rhythm, or even to find it at all, especially if not reading out loud, but even then, there are some standout moments.

In one poem, she uses the words to form the bridge she's describing, in another, she puts down strings of letters as a sort of abstract representation of the sound of rain on water.

It's lovely, it's playful, it's serious, it's wonderfully alive.

When snow reaches belly height
even moose
tread tiredly --
a trailing tunnel
a scar
on winter white
One night
the girl
called out to me --
I'm going to climb into you
and freeze (p.31)

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skeena is essentially a series of poems, photographs, scientific reports, tourist descriptions, highway signs, etc., that form a larger narrative about the Skeena River. The poems are all written in first-person from the river's perspective and many of them untitled.

I really enjoyed this book because of three things: (1) I am a sucker for personification of nature, (2) I like it when contemporary poets play around with different materials, as well as the space on the page, and (3) I love water. I liked that, despite constructing a story about the Skeena using prose pieces along with the poems, the poems didn't feel as though they were superfluous—they expanded on context given by the prose, bringing the river to life. Moreover, the poems used all manner of poetic devices instead of relying solely on rhythm and intonation, although they do have a fair amount of that also.

The major feature of the book that I wasn't particularly taken with is the use of space, while at the same time finding the use of space fantastic. I think it's a fault of the book's dimensions; there were great spaces between certain elements of the poems (naturally, for effect) that would be so spaced out that some words fell upon the following line, which takes away some of the oomph for me. However, there were times when the spaces were well spaced and the emotion was there. And then again, sections where the gaps were nonstop and I felt that it was a bit much or that the rhythm that was made by those spaces affected the emotional impact in a negative way or created an awkwardness.

Nevertheless, I found this book to be a complex and moving portrayal of the Skeena River, which is often overlooked in British Columbia since more people are concentrated around the Fraser River. I liked the mélange of poetry with prose with photographs; I also thought that the use of space and spacing was uncommon in the contemporary poetry that I have read and found that to be a key factor in my enjoyment—and displeasure—with the work.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection of poems about the Skeena river, using poetry, found pieces, and historical bits. It was quite evocative.

I'd love to read something like this for the North or South Saskatchewan river. :)

Beautiful book.

[Jakelene · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely stunning collection of poetry - Sarah de Leeuw is a master of words, image, and tone. While the entire collection is worth a read, I found the standout poems to be the extremely short ones, ranging from a few words to a few lines, and the longer narrative poems (particularly "Moose.")

This is a book I want to revisit in the future.