Kevin Irie, Evacuations

 

That one phrase no one needed to remind you of all your life: advice, warning,
finally, lament. Remember. Remember? Someone speaks in your voice 

but not with your memory. Repeating words like bells on a buoy
not quite able to right itself. How a buoy doesn’t hear the warning it rings. 

The higher the boat
the lower

We see what we hear. Sons touch but can’t reach
the you who laughed as he flipped the barbecue salmon, who’d not bother 

To check. You knew it’d taste good. A splash of shoyu.
Just another few minutes. To even have that. 

The higher the boat
the lower the catch 

(“The Higher the Boat… (An Alzheimer’s Elegy)”)

 The latest from Toronto-based Japanese-Canadian poet Kevin Irie is Evacuations (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2026), a title that follows his collections Burning the Dead (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1992), The Colour of Eden (Alma NB: Owl’s Head Press, 1996), Dinner at Madonna’s (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2003), Angel Blood: The Tess Poems (Frontenac House, 2004), Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report (Frontenac House, 2012) and The Tantramar Re-Vision (Montreal QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). Irie’s work-to-date gives the sense of each poetry collection as a kind of self-contained project, and Evacuations focuses on, as the back cover offers: “[…] a poetic documentary for readers, capturing the personal and political histories of the Japanese-Canadian internment in British Columbia during World War II. The resulting poems oscillate between the lyric mode and techniques of erasure poetry to highlight the dehumanizing nature of public decrees and government notices. Irie deconstructs the Canadian state’s racist policies, creating a record of painful memories replete with archival resonances.” Across the poems that make up Evacuations, he sets his subject square in the cetnre, writing around and through in an assembled stretch of accumulated lyrics. Set as two sections—the hefty opening section “Of the White Man’s Well Being” and subsequent “After”—the collection opens with a simple, two page poem of assembled couplets, “On Reading Joy Kogawa,” the first half of such reads:

Reading Joy Kogawa’s poem on the evacuation,
I suddenly waken to the fact 

That the people I knew, who knew her
are gone. Grown-ups 

who would tell me of her life
in Slocan, the ghost town; 

the grown-ups who could have described her school
because they taught there. 

Who could show me the school photo
an actual proof. 

That when I sought out little Joy
across rows of small children, 

It was the grown-up beside them
I remember the most. 

That when I tell others my family knew her,
and how.

For those unaware, Joy Kogawa (b. 1935) is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent, who published, among other titles, the classic semi-autobiographical novel Obasan in 1981, one of the first and most powerful literary depictions through Japanese internment in Canada during the Second World War (her former childhood home in Vancouver has operated a writer-in-residence program since 2011, run by The Historic Joy Kogawa House Society). Irie begins with Kogawa, offering her writing and example as the crux, the foundation, of the collection itself. From that opening poem, the first poem of the section that follows is “What Do I Remember (Hearing) of the Evacuation,” a poem subtitled “after Joy Kogawa’s ‘What Do I Remember of the Evacuation,’” a poem that begins: “First, / that most Canadians don’t even know of the internment. // That you can ask them and watch their eyes glaze over, look off elsewhere. // (The perfect depiction of me as a child.) // That the internees are dead or dying, though each obit mentions / where they were held during the War. // Of the many wars, / there is always one most personal to a family [.]”

There is something interesting in the way that Irie structures the poems across this collection, as each poem offers a different narrative facet of the larger story, and building the book almost as a kind of book-length essay or non-fiction through the lyric of first-person observational poems and archival erasures. “A grey sky clears like detonation smoke // but young fathers still stand. Before they were parents. / It’s hard to tell who they are in photos // but here is a road camp at Solsqua, Eagle River,” he writes, as part of the poem “Of the Japanese-Canadians Who Built / the Trans-Canada Highway,” “cabins where wood stoves glowed orange as koi, // hope burned small and intense as a brazier. / The sun’s white belly rising each morning, // a mound of warm rice.” As much as this is a poetry collection around the experiences of those who went through internment as Japanese Canadians during the war, it is as much a collection around memory itself, and the loss of family history, family story, and that particular generation, as well as their direct experiences. Composed as a thoroughly-researched lyric surrounding and articulating the details of internment, Irie approaches the trauma of the period in ways archival and intimate, working through stories he’d been raised with, and encounters with those who had direct experience. He writes of the after, the during and the before, when such traumas were impossible to imagine. “Before they became a story / no one told them could happen,” ends the poem “Pre-War Photos,” “someone took a photo / to not prove it.”