Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood

 

Undertaker

No sign, just a small brick
building. I ring the doorbell, a slight
man answers. His hello has no greeting.
He wears an argyle sweater. I say my father’s
name. He gestures and I follow
through the narrow, carpeted hallway
to some hard-backed chairs where I must
wait. His sweater disappears around
a corner, and I’m left facing a heavy red
curtain—but there’s a gap. Between
curtain and wall, I see a white-socked
ankle and the grey pant cuff of a man
who’s no longer his body. The undertaker
returns, snaps the curtain closed, keeping
the living from the dead. He holds out
a small white box with my father’s name
typed on the label. I need both hands. I thank him,
then hear my voice ask, How hot does it get
to bring a body to ash? When he speaks,
he looks past me. On the drive home
I try to remember his answer.

I was curious to see the full-length poetry debut by Pender Harbour, British Columbia-based poet Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood (St. John’s NL: Riddle Fence Publishing, 2024), part of a trio of poetry debuts produced through St. John’s, Newfoundland literary journal Riddle Fence, as it slowly moves to branch out into book publishing. And no, Tia McLennan isn’t, as far as we are aware, any relation to myself, although her family did also emerge from Glengarry County, her particular line leaving Eastern Ontario long before I did, originally landing that way some fifty or sixty years before my own McLennan lineage made those Lancaster docks. Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a collection composed of small lyric scenes across a tapestry of family moments, writing a dream-scape around the loss of her father (my immediate namesake, incidentally). “To think of leaving / as if it were a train station / to move through and we are / always late.” she writes, as part of the poem “Late Letter to Dad.” The narratives of her poems are shaped, often shaved down to a single thought, a single thought-line, such as the short poem “Hungry,” as the first half of such reads: “Driving around the gravel bend / in Dream Valley and catching / a slim coyote gliding down / the middle of the road toward / me. I slowed, hoping to get a closer / look at something wild.” The poems are contained as small moments or scenes, held together across a soft cadence of sentences and line-breaks. There is an unease through these poems, one intertwined with memory, loss and grief, all of which are rendered in relation to that dream-scape, whether aside or from deep within. “I have updated your address / and added your darkest thoughts to the file.” she writes, to open the poem “Now You Have Full Access,” “You must fill out the forms / using only spit and moonlight. // If you forget your password, / press your face to the earth in springtime.”