Dawn Macdonald, Northerny

 

A BORING POEM

I’m not so interested in writing
any Northern/Nature/Yukoner poems about the Northern Lights and
my trusty-sled-dog-see-your-breath-adventure but all my poems turn
out to have animals in them because that’s where I’m

and I do share 50% of my DNA with a banana

so I don’t want to hear any more about how I’m
bad at sharing just because I’m an only child
and everybody’s bad at assumptions

well at the end of the day I was born
here at the end of the day in a thunder
storm of anesthesia and incubation

an animal purred into that room, nipped
a neat umbilical, wolfed
my head right out of the womb.   that’s its breath

on the window page

      blurring

                              it makes a real hot meat view

From Whitehorse, Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald comes the full-length debut Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024), a collection set in and responding to her particular landscape, place and experience of what the rest of us in the lower parts of Canada refer to as the north. “Fireweed is edible and best before / the bloom.” she writes, as part of the poem “ROADSIDE WILDFLOWERS OF THE NORTHWEST,” “Pigweed, a sort of spinach. / Kinnikinnick, we called it / honeysuckle. There’s something else called / honeysuckle. We’d call it what / we want.” As she highlit during her launch a few weeks prior, the poems here refuse the easy depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop. “growth is its own / value proposition.” she writes, as part of the poem “INCREASE,” “love’s supposed / to be automatic / like transmission.”

Macdonald’s poems flash light, offering intrigues of clarity, depth of lyric intrigue across narratives that depict and document a particular kind of angled roughness and wilderness. “One day the wind will have my heart, I guess,” she writes, as part of the poem “WALKING THE LONG LOOP,” “flash fried and let fly from the jar of ash, / assuming such litter is permitted, and you’re there / to flip that lid. / I could do worse than to lodge, / even the barest bonescrap, atop / a nodule of pine. Anything / with sap in it, a line / to the nearest star.”Playing off Emily Dickinson, her opening poem, “FIRST THINGS,” hold to the small moments of chickens and broken eggs, writing: “Riddle wrapped up inside, / cased, laid, brooded, clucked upon, clean // as a whistle. An egg’s / a thing / with features, but, order / of operations applies – a flashlight shone clean / through the inside / illuminates outline, diagram, edges blown: [.]”