Laurie D. Graham, Fast Commute

 

I don’t want to write it. I know the scene as home:
the oil refineries rising from poplars
overlooking the river, the tank farms downstream,
the offgassing from stacks painted like candy canes,
the manufactured cloud formations—
they treat these flames as eternal, eschewing the clean
for the cheap and the quick. I don’t want this
tied to the trees or spoken aloud, this
inheritance, our confluence, our shame,
the windows of the houses on the opposite bank
observing the transfers, the neighbourhood park
that used to be the dump, and the quiet
of the river through each process, the banks
dropping away slowly, the river so large and old
it’s thought both impervious and already dead,
but instead it’s eroding the ground, and for good reason.

Toronto poet and editor Laurie D. Graham’s third full-length poetry title, after Rove (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2013) and Settler Education (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2016), is Fast Commute (McClelland and Stewart, 2022). Much like Toronto poet Phoebe Wang’s simultaneously-published Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart, 2022), Fast Commute attempts to come to terms with our colonial past and present, viewed through an ecological lens—two elements clearly intertwined and impossible to separate—something her work has been engaged with for some time. “Cities joined,” she writes, early on in the collection, “though separated by rivers, / cities twinned by growth, tension nested in the hyphen [.]” Set as a long poem through short, collaged sections, introduced by a self-contained opening salvo, there are structural echoes of Don McKay’s infamous Long Sault (London ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975) through her narrative layerings, historical asides and attentions to landscape. “Knowledge of home in danger of becoming academic.” she offers. “An empty can of energy drink under a sugar maple. / A black squirrel crossing critical thresholds: // roadwall, greenstrip, chainlink, trail, wooden fence, property.” She writes on refineries and tearing resources from the eroding landscape, citing settler histories and occupation, and the ways in which these opposing thoughts can’t help but find conflict.

Refinery giving way to ravine, giving way to
river. The refinery’s chainlink lining one side of the trail.

Dragonfly hovering, the bank
receding, their chainlink in danger.

The smell of thistle, the sweetness of an open field under sun.
Sky and ground, half and half.

The roses, the raspberries, the human
scale. The massive rumble always there.

As you near the road,
you must turn toward it.

Her meditations move through homesteading and settler culture, including around her Ukrainian forebears landing in the prairie sod, pulling up the earth for the sake of establishing roots. Writing of roots simultaneously broken and established, she cites the forest’s edge against the encroaching machinery. “The extractive machinery scrapes away / a wide, wide swath, an industrial-yard welcome. / Buildings poke out of the curved horizon, / appear as one in the distance, / a tasteful sci-fi dread. / After a feeling of bush and home, / recalling the warmth as a child / of lights in the dark in the distance, / of the city appearing.” She writes of depictions, and of names, histories and contexts ignored, for the sake of colonialism. “Dufferin, Simcoe, Dundas, King, Queen, Victoria, so I never know / where I am and could be anywhere and this is heritage,” she writes. While offering no conclusions, Graham’s Fast Commute focuses on acknowledging and articulating the length and breath of losses, breaks and potential losses still to come, and how much she herself emerged along a particular path of colonial thinking through her own genealogical trail, working to challenge her own thinking as she attempts to move forward. As she writes:

Manitou Asinîy in the Royal Alberta Museum,
which we crawled all over on field trips.
They renamed it Iron Creek meteorite, obscured its meaning,
Manitou Asinîy powerful and not to be touched,
and what did we do by touching it