Keagan Hawthorne, After the Harvest

 

THE DARK

When she was little my mother wanted to hear
what the river had to say.
She pressed her ear to the ice
            and it spoke.

A neighbour saw,
guessed where to chop a hole downstream.
A miracle, they said, our Lazarus.
Her father gave the man a cow.

Three weeks in bed and no one asked
what the lights were like beneath the ice,
            what darkness.

A shame, she thought.
It was beautiful.

I’m just now getting into Sackville, New Brunswick poet and letterpress printer (founder of Hardscrabble Press, who is also in the process of taking over Gaspereau Press) Keagan Hawthorne’s full-length debut, After the Harvest (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), a carved sequence of family stories cut and shaped into stone. Hawthorne sets up a landscape of east coast barrens, every word in its proper place, akin to the kind of Newfoundland patter and long descriptive phrases and sentences of Michael Crummey’s Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “Well, you know, we had a few good years,” Hawthorne writes, to open the poem “THE BOOK OF RUTH,” “no kids but a nice house, jobs, / and when the end came it was mercifully quick. // His mother moved in for the last few weeks / to help with care, and stayed on / after the funeral to help me clean things up.” There is a physicality to these poems that are quite interesting; a rhythm of storytelling, and a story properly told, through the rhythm and patterns of first-person ease across such descriptive motion. “It was a spring of record heat,” the poem “SPRING FEVER” begins, “when you walked down to the river, / found the pool above the beaver weir / and took off all your clothes.”