Michael Goodfellow, Folklore of Lunenburg County

 

BALLAD

—tide scraped against rusty grate,
against ironstone, in and out of the culvert,

creosote burnished,
and pulled at its bleached beams

and rafters waterlogged with rot
salt had almost been enough to stop

—pulled at graves of the Protestant dead
at Riverport, in Creaser’s Cove,

at whitewashed stones and apple root
washed clean, bright with tawn,

where in some pit the sea rustled
and threw up sand

—d metal flaked off from the world above,
hulls, rock ground off Gaff Point,

wind pulled, sky turned,
salt line drawn,

horizon flat across the river’s face
and blew to keep the gash in place

The second full-length poetry title by Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow, following Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], is Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Goodfellow’s latest collection riffs off the volume Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia (Ottawa ON: E. Cloutier, King’s Printer, 1950) by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton (1899–1989), the spirit of that particular collection utilized as a prompt for Goodfellow’s explorations on landscape, folklore and storytelling through the form of the narrative, first-person lyric. According to one online biography for Creighton: “She collected 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that spanned several decades and published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore.” “A haunting was a dream you had with your eyes open,” Goodfellow writes, as part of “OTHERS SAID DISAPPEARANCE / WAS RINGED LIKE A TRUNK,” “just as the sky was paved with the light of stones. / The forest was a wall that painted itself. / The forest was a door that didn’t close.” As the back cover of Goodfellow’s collection offers, his poems “are rooted in the ethnogeography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place.” Part of the strength of Goodfellow’s lyrics is his ability to offer such precise physicality, composing poems hewn, and hand-crafted with a hint of wistful, folkloric fancy in otherwise pragmatic offerings. “The light how stars are brighter / when you don’t stare at them,” he writes, to open “WINTER LEGEND,” “how a fall day could feel like spring, / how a dog won’t look at you when it’s frightened, // how ash is the last to leaf, / how on certain nights / it was said that animals could speak, // how we named the stars other things. / How often their names were animals.”

Collected across two section-halves, “TOPOLOGIES” and “REVENANTS,” the poems of Goodfellow’s Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia are grounded in a particular geographic tradition of storytelling, crafted through direct statements that bend as required, offering hints of unexplained conditions and supernatural encounters, extending or turning his view. His is a precise lyric of landscape and dreams, folktales and loss. As he writes to close the poem “GHOST STORY”: “When the ground was cold such things were clear. / Only later did it seem like we’d imagined them.” There is something intriguing about how Goodfellow utilizes the suggestion of outside sources for his framing, from the “bibliography” of his full-length debut to now taking Helen Creighton’s work as a prompt through which to respond in his own way to what he sees, as though seeking an outside lens from which to jump off of, to begin to explore, in his own way, the landscape, stories and people of his home county and province. Through Creighton, Goodfellow responds to both the stories themselves and the collection of those stories. “The stories collected were fragmentary,” he writes, to open the prose poem “MOTIFS,” “not even stories / in some cases, just a line or two about what they had seen.”