Skookum (adj.): A Chinook Jargon word that has historical use in the Pacific Northwest. It has a range of meanings, commonly associated with an English translation of "strong" or "monstrous". The word can mean "strong", "greatest", "powerful", "ultimate", or "brave".
When a writer chooses a title for their manuscript, they know it has to be one that encapsulates its theme or at least captures the mood or atmosphere that the piece conveys. In “Skookum Raven”, Heather Haley has given a name to the muscular, assertive, confident personality that pervades her third full printed book of poetry. When you get to know her, you realize it’s her personality there- strong, intelligent, unapologetic, sexy, genuine. You also realize that it is the backbone of the coastline off the Pacific surf as well, the staggered archipelago, the jagged spine of mountains off in the fog, the skyscraping palisades of buildings in the urban fallback and the resilient denizens of the derelict old city...
Haley has had the title of “The Siren of Howe Sound” given to her for her stalwart presence on Bowen Island as a prolific sonic and visual artist through the first decade of this millennium, as well as having been a punk princess through the Eighties and early Nineties with such bands as The Zellots and the .45s. Recent years have been much more domestic in comparison to her formative years, but her poetry testifies that she will never be milquetoast, and she remains as vibrant and vocal as she has ever been. With ‘Skookum Raven’, Haley reasserts her tenure as a powerful and eloquent poet, still tied in to the pulse of the human condition, still cognizant of the vibrations and reverberations of modern life.
With each piece, she displays an actor’s eloquence, slinging together rhythmic verses that contain an elastic energy, as she does in ‘A Larcenous Groom’s Cool-Off Period’:
“He boosts
street signs. That’ll stop their goddamned
touch the sky routine,
bestows his buddy Guy
with a JACKSON ST,
a little vainglory for the double wide.”
Throughout the book, each poem is imbued with the light of the salty coastal sun, rich with the recognizable language and topography of the B.C. coast, as illustrated in ‘Pacific Time’:
“Cedar jungle.
Left coast.
Mellifluous bees and
Hummingbirds swarm
The morning, a teeming creek
Bows to the sea.”
Or as in ‘I Saw You’:
“Teacher in Surrey, living in Van.
You had a giant bottle for making mead.
Whistler Gondola Saturday morning,
Still embarrassed by my runny nose.”
With smouldering heat she enforces her feminism with several bold vignettes of dalliances with capricious, idiotic men, taking snippets of conversations she’s had or overheard, and elaborates the unintended self-incriminations and the metaphors that come from them, as again with ‘A Larcenous Groom’s Cool-Off Period’:
“He pinches
his sister-in-law Emily
in the pocketbook.
Emily, who mourns the loss
of her younger sibling.
“I’d like to hearse her away
for Chrissakes.”
She latches on to her connections with the existing punk ethos with ‘Riots of Pussy’, referring to the Russian feminist punk activist movement, evoking the knitted balaclava, the political witch burnings and consequent police crackdowns, finishing the piece with the single, final assertion: “nyet.”
It’s a pattern in her style, where she makes her metaphorical observations, then encapsulates them all neatly in the last verse. In such style, she also closes the book with a comment that is close to the bone with the province of British Columbia and its history of man camps, toxic masculinity and murdered and missing indigenous women. ‘The Last Ping’ is heartbreaking in its depiction of the soulless industry surrounding the investigations of missing women in Northwest B.C., and the interjections of male toxicity throughout is haunting in its richness. Lost is the girl at the center of it all, buried, mired in all the societal dissonance that obscures her humanity, forsaken in all of the distractions that cancel her existence and thus any hopes for her salvation.
In all, the power of Heather Haley, siren, poet and punk princess, burns hot and bright in these pages. Her fire is as constant as the sun that blazes in her hair, through her words which convey a sharp and powerful thrust that stitches truth and education in us. It pulls us in and holds us captive, slave to her truth, helpless to argue. With “Skookum Raven”, Haley assures us that she always has something to say, has more stories to tell, because the world around us still revolves, and still offers things for us to observe, judge and beg for commentary. As long as there are things to be said, she will have the strength, bravery and intelligence to say them.
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