Orioles in The Oranges

By Melanie Janisse

Orioles in the Oranges is a collection of poems that tells the story of love and loss as they find common ground in a Metis legend and in modern times. The poems weave the contemporary voice of a young woman who finds herself on Pelee Island letting go of a lover with the telling of the Pelee Island story of a Metis woman who plunges to her death in Lake Erie after being abandoned by her English husband. The narratives dovetail, and grapple with the pull of physical and psychic places that we all find in the experience of finding and losing love. {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781550715002

Melanie Janisse

Melanie Janisse is a native of Windsor, Ontario. She holds degrees Communications from Concordia University and Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Now a resident of Toronto, Melanie keeps active as a visual artist, poet, designer and shop owner. Orioles in the Oranges is her first collection of poetry.

Book preview

MELANIE JANISSE

ORIOLES IN THE ORANGES

 FIRST POETS SERIES 5

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2009  

My body is a temple

Someday I will realize it

After all I have done.

My body is a temple

Someday I will stand before Him

And try and explain.

P.W. Long’s Reelfoot, Temple,

We Didn’t See You on Sunday

Foreword

Orioles in the Oranges is a book of prose poems in two narratives. The contemporary voice is that of a young woman who leaves Toronto for Pelee Island – her childhood summer place. She begins to let go of a destructive love and sift through memories that paint vivid pictures of Detroit, Van- couver, Toronto, and Pelee Island. Her journey is likened to the migration of birds that famously pass through the island. The volatility of her love is described by the thunderstorms that pass through Lake Erie, and her losses become lists of things sunk to the bottom of the lake – ships, planes, old rum-running cars, rubbish. Woven through her story is an interpretation of a famous Pelee Island legend – the myth of Hulda. Hulda was a Métis woman who plunged to her death in Lake Erie after the loss of her English husband. This second narrative is a series of voices: Hulda’s mother – Owl Grandmother, Hulda’s husband, and Hulda herself. The use of italics in this second narrative signifies the ghost-like quality of these characters.

The story begins with Hulda’s mother – a young woman of German descent – who was kid- napped from a New England sugaring-off camp by Chief Pontiac’s men. (Pontiac was an Ottawa leader famous for his role in the native rebellion, 1763-1766, against the British military occupa- tion of the Great Lakes region.) Hulda’s mother experiences an internal struggle as she comes to love her captors. She tells us of her child’s birth in Lake Erie, and her strange premonition of her daughter’s fate. We hear the voices of Hulda