Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me

 

Under Russian’s boot,
under England’s boot, 

they sailed off
to become the boot 

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees— 

investment companies
bulldozing the windbreaks, 

filling in the sloughs, flattening
hills and houses, seeding the ditches, 

every arable, pilfered inch— 

the settlement story going sour
in the heat and the haze. (“Toward an Origin Story”)

Edmonton-born Peterborough, Ontario-based poet and editor Laurie D. Graham’s latest, following Rove (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2013), Settler Education (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2016) and Fast Commute (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) [see my review of such here], is the poetry title Calling It Back to Me (McClelland and Stewart, 2026). Composed as a book-length and quartered suite—with extended sequence-sections “Calling It Back to Me,” “The Great-Grandmothers,” “Toward an Origin Story” and “A Good Closing”—Graham writes specifically of maternal lines, “her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent,” tracing and trailing the stories of women who traded one homeland for another, exploring broken memory, history, geography and genealogy, and the inherent colonial impulse they carried. “Still the urge is for / story. She wants to give.” Graham writes, on the opening page. “A bright yellow moon / rises in her mind. // A small pink curl / of cloud. // No language / for any of it.”

One can argue the length and breadth of Graham’s explorations through poetry, and the book-length poem, have their solid foundations in the prairie long poems of the 1970s—think of Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, Monty Reid, et al—blending with the archaeological precision and craft of Tim Lilburn or Don McKay, as well as contending with the more contemporary lens of the legacies of colonialism. “Northern Ireland    in the 1920s // and not a word,” she writes, across the expansive second section, a long poem stretched across fragments of visual space. Further along the same thread, offering: “Her eldest daughter teaches her children      her grandchildren // that they came from a place      it appears    they never lived in /// All  her brothers   already here // and cousins    and uncles        then husbands   then her // a siphoning [.]” Through Graham, each subseuqnet collection provides new ways for her to think through histories both intriguing and deeply complicated, rooted in those prairie stretches. Given the length and breadth, the distances, of her work so far, it would be intriguing to catch a selected and new volume of her work, for the sake of articulating a wider overview of her work-to-date. But for now, through Calling It Back to Me, Graham attempts to articulate a people seeking stability amid the upheavals of history, and the benefits of the author’s hindsight; and seeking a language to match with their experiences, too fresh and unfamiliar to quickly do anything but come up short. As the opening section continues:

Edges of the photographs
disintegrating. Names 

on the census misspelled.
Creases erasing the facts 

from the birth certificate.
The town history’s broken spine. 

The story as he told it
in his last years 

from a distance. All this
is coming into my hands. 

A one-word answer
on an immigration form 

becomes our imagined

founding, what we say
about our being here.