We have always been close to the river. Even in prehistory, mankind has always
settled along the riverside. It’s there
where the plants and trees are most lush, it’s where our food has always been
most plentiful, and its waters have always been available for swift commute from
community to community. Perhaps this is
why we have always had an affinity to bodies of water. We have always been there.
The waters by which poet
Catherine Owen has metaphysically settled are those of the Fraser River, which
flows through the heart of Greater Vancouver where she was born and raised. Though currently based in Edmonton, Owen’s
time within walking distance of the Fraser has given her immeasurable solace
and wrought this book of poetry, which she has entitled “Riven”. As she says in “The River System”, the long
poem on the last pages of the book:
“if
I were only staring out
upon land, I would be
heartbroken...”
In Riven she considers
with keen observational depth the lessons that a river can offer about the
brevity of life, the eternity of love, the continuity of survival and the
futility of death. With these rich
descriptions, Owen brings you into the space that she occupied while on her
morning stomps along the industrial rubble and eroded pebble at the water’s
edge, using the river as a constant metaphor for life, death and their
byproduct, which is memory.
In memory, her thoughts fall upon
her deceased husband as she remains true to his legacy as her muse, the basis
of much of her poetic thought. Much of her works has centered around that loss
in previous works that she has made, but as Junot Diaz will tell you- “the
half life of love is forever”, which is to say that love- even lost love-
never fades. From the river, she considers the paradox of grieving in the collection’s
first poem; “Thirty-Six Sentences on the Fraser River That Could Serve as a
Very Small Nest”
“The
river is like your death; it just keeps moving away from me.”
She notes that the river is water that constantly passes us by
yet remains a constant presence, illustrating the paradox of both the river and
of death.
She touches on even more
paradoxes during her morning walks along the Fraser, documenting the industrial
constructs that have been erected on the waterfront as well as the natural insistences
that grow between and beneath them. She doesn’t differentiate the artificial
from the natural. They all exist in the
same environment, as she considers in the poem; “Beseech”
“Their
origins, stone, perhaps, or song.”
Her most frequent imagery, and
the one that brings us alongside as she would “prolong along the estuary”
is that of the “silver river”, especially in the series of aubade poems,
which serves as the centerpiece of the book.
The imagery conjures up that magical phase of the early morning when the
sun has just risen and the perspective of light gives the river a pristine metallic
shine that cuts through any depression or dulling effect of the surroundings. As she says in “The Last Aubade”:
“…silver you could say as scars, as age,
Or ashes – silver as what holds everything this morning…”
Throughout the book’s conception,
the shining quicksilver of the Fraser has lit Owen’s solitary mornings and cut
through the miasma of her grieving. The
river has also served well as a backdrop and starting point for her to create
her ideas that form this beautiful tribute to the rivers that constantly flow through
our lives as well as the beautiful man for which she grieves. Riven presents some of the most
descriptive and incisive poetry that Catherine Owen has ever offered, derived
from a place of deep contemplation and raw emotive power, a place not unlike
the river that flows through all of us, through time, love and memory.
