Go Down Odawa Way

by D.A. Lockhart

Daniel Lockhart has taken the land and the history of the place —a southwestern Ontario territory called the Three Fires Confederacy, now known as Windsor and Detroit — and casts it in the light of today.

76 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2021

About the author

D.A. Lockhart is the author of nine books, including North of Middle Island (Kegedonce Press, 2023) Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House, 2021) and Breaking Right: Stories (Porcupine's Quill, 2021). His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2019, TriQuarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Grain, Belt, and the Malahat Review among many. His work has garnered multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, Best of the Net nominations, and National Magazine Prize Nominations. His books have been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Indiana Authors Awards, First Nations Communities READ Awards, and the Raymond Souster Award.

Lockhart is a Turtle Clan member of Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lenape), a registered treatied member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at the south shore of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor,ON-Detroit, MI) and Pelee Island. His work has been generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

Reviews

[MARTY GERVAIS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go Down Odawa Way
D. A. Lockhart
Kegedonce Press
86 pages

I heard so much about this book by Windsor-based writer D.A. Lockhart, and looked forward to reading it. The reason is that in part it’s about my neighbourhood, my roots. The environs of the Detroit River. The traditional territories of the Three Fires Confederacy. My ancestors, hailing from Normandy, crossed the stormy Atlantic, and first made their way from the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and from there to what is now southwestern Ontario in 1708. They were the first French family to settle on the south shore of the Detroit River in a place called Waawiiyaatanong.

I’ve lived here most of my life, and as I say, in picking up Go Down Odawa Way, it was in some ways like holding up a mirror thinking you are going to find your own face. Big surprise, it’s the face of another, maybe a stranger. More importantly, maybe someone you ought to know. A culture at the very roots of this place. Thankfully, Lockhart is there to tell you that story, to take you on a journey that dips into history, culture, storytelling, myth, the mysteries of language and landscape. Here the poet sounds an ominous statement of the past: “Each holocaust has its survivors, songs/individuals that remain and call out/to what was taken before…” At the same time, the poet, however, invites us to quiet down, listen, hear the story, and in one poem after another, sings to us what is truest, what is not so evident to everyone. He speaks of the Great Western Park, and the tangled railway lines that not so long ago crisscrossed itself across the vast waterfront, and how that corporate undertaking swept away all that came before. He tells it straight — this was nothing more than a “gouging” of the earth, greedily scraping away all its identity.

Lockhart, the virtuoso poet, provides us an impressive and brilliant work that is original, vivid, and is executed with haunting and lyrical force as he moves from one subject to another. In these poems, he offers a startling narrative most often depicted in the frustrating wrangle and tension between the natural landscape and the industrial and urban sprawl. In that mix, we encounter characters and stories that inform and dazzle a reader, some present day, others borrowed from the 18th century.

A favourite section is a series of sonnets for neighbouring smaller rivers, like Turkey Creek that “warbles … trills/In song for what is absent.” Or Little River, a favourite hike for me, and Lockhart captures it well: “…still water between/corrugated metal break walls…”

In a poem centred on Hogg Island (in the Detroit River), nearby where Pontiac camped, Lockhart moves in to remind us again that no matter how much the land has been sacrificed to industry, “this earth/knows itself reflected in the glow/of Council fires … “ In other words, pay attention to the land. and pay attention to what is still there beneath all that has been disfigured and forgotten over time.

— Marty Gervais

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Lockhart’s pulsating poetry, the bones of land live:
“the first gift of creation
is the turtle shell we tread upon”.

Marty Gervais’s review expresses Lockhart’s complex history of home well, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

“Go Down Odawa Way, guide this sedan
northward to the great bending shores
between lakes larger than seas. Make
front page driving news, arriving along
spider vein freeways. This is home
in the lands warmed in the afterglow
of the second fire of the Midewin”

To be read in conjunction with D.A. Lockhart’s earlier Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and Shores Bend:

“I sing out words
formed from muscle memory, don’t let the sound of your own wheels
drive you crazy.”

“a constellation of loss behind him.

Flickering red lights
emerge between clouds,
ancestors return home.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

In these collections, tributes to the Moon, to local rivers, are all named in the Southern Unami dialect of Lenape, sounding out the names. These poem sequences are presented in Japanese forms and narrative as a rich hybrid mélange, just as tradition surfaces in city life.
Poems of long memory, closely observed.

[Lorna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite the poems being at times beautiful, I just could not bring myself to enjoy this collection. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so far removed from the focal region, because I’m not Indigenous or because I just don’t understand poetry but this poetry collection just was not for me.