then/again

By Michelle Elrick

Michelle Elrick's then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places—an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast—as well as the memory-warped terrain of the poet's past houses.

In brief poetic capsules that combine to form long, lyrical narratives, Elrick enfolds layers of tactile and remembered experience, offering continual moments of surprise. In the observer's eye, the double act of perceiving and writing lends transformative and mythic properties to the everyday: "a heron drums a pattern of shadows on the surface of the sea, wings tick with quartz regularity. bay clouds spot red, bulbs of peach bloom, smoulder and die down into blue.” The collection is infused by a sense of nostalgia and longing within the present moment, illustrating the elusiveness of home even while it is being lived: "I watch as the day opens, expanding its geometry. diffuse light penetrates the blind. hot sun yellows cold concrete (caress stretching across the courtyard).”

Each quiet moment of reflection builds upon the others to produce a sense of place that is as immediate and fleeting as home itself. Elrick has an uncanny sense for capturing and illuminating those moments that will later glow in memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Mar 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9780889711228

Michelle Elrick

Michelle Elrick is the author of To Speak (The Muses’ Company, 2010). Her poetry has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Event, Poetry Is Dead and on CBC television. then/again is Elrick's second collection of poetry. She was a finalist in the CBC Poetry Prize in 2015. She lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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then/again

then/

again

Michelle Elrick

2017

Copyright © Michelle Elrick, 2017

all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or

other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca , [e-mail] .

Nightwood Editions

P.O. Box 1779

Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

Canada

www.nightwoodeditions.com

cover design: Amber McMillan

typography: Carleton Wilson

illustrations: Pawet Bignell

Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from

the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and

the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.

ISBN 978-0-88971-331-4

for M.B.

Introduction

Space transforms into place as it acquires definition and meaning.

—Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place

The imagination of going home so frequently means going ‘back’ in both space and time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to be. … [T]he truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed.

—Doreen Massey, For Space

It is the height of spring. Winnipeg’s annual thaw is soaking the soil, filling rivers to the brim. Silt water floods the lowlands depositing new, fertile mud. Wet clouds ride warm air, raining fresh water from the sky. And as the sun reaches through the atmosphere to touch my bare skin, my body remembers. Hot August, the relief of shade, the sweet scent of sunbaked skin. Today I’m leaving on a journey to find the homes of my past. Only one of the places I’ll visit was a former residence of mine; the others are homes I have inherited through ancestry. I’ll be visiting the Parish of Rathven, Scotland, where the last Scottish Elricks of my paternal line lived prior to their emigration in the mid-nineteenth century. Then I’ll be in Salzburg, Austria where my mother was born and raised until age ten, with a final stop in Abbotsford, British Columbia where I spent my first twenty years.

What is home? Since childhood, I have played with various definitions, trying to get at the heart of the concept, to pin it down with meaning. At