Foreign Homes

By Joan Crate

Shortlisted for the 2002 Pat Lowther Award

Foreign Homes, Joan Crate's second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home -- often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a torn photograph. In Crate's careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war. Her migratory poems slip from voice to voice, from love to landscape to language, present to past, exile to return, illuminating the boundary that is also a border crossing between one person, one place, and another.

Domestic images and personal narrative surround a burning, incantatory sequence at the centre of the book, where poems circle Shawnandithit, a Beothuk who died in exile in Newfoundland in the nineteenth century, the last of her people. In giving voice to what is unknown, feared, lost, and silent, Crate’s playful language is itself powerfully involved in this act-often violent-of breaking and making anew. And whether these homes are stolen or lost or stumblingly found, Crate is unflinching even as her own homes are made and un-made, watching those "who wait on the porch steps/ eager to move into our youth,/ to reassemble our bones."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2002
• ISBN: 9781771312882

Joan Crate

Joan Crate was born in the Northwest Territories at Sǫǫ̀mbak'è on Chief Drygeese territory, traditional land of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. After finding homes in various places, she now lives in Calgary - Mohkinstsis - and the rural Okanagan on the unceded territory of sqilxʷ/syilx (Okanagan) peoples. She writes both poetry and fiction and has won several writing awards over the years, including the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award for Black Apple, which was also shortlisted for the Frank Hegyi Award. The band U2, of whom she's a big fan, featured her poem "I am a Prophet" on screen in their last Canadian tour. She lost her partner of almost four decades at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, she has had work appear in five anthologies and on CBC Radio. She continues to explore writing in all its forms, visual art and is even dabbling in acting.

Book preview

FOREIGN HOMES

FOREIGN HOMES

JOAN CRATE

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Crate, Joan, 1953–

     Foreign homes

Poems.

ISBN 1-894078-19-5

     1. Title

PS8555.R338F67 2001       C811’54       C2001-902944-6

PR9199.3.C66828F67 2001

Copyright©Joan Crate 2001.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing programme. The support of the Ontario Arts Council is also gratefully acknowledged.

The cover photograph of the author's in-laws and their family was taken by an unknown photographer around 1963 in Lebanon. Because divorce is illegal for Christians in Lebanon, the adults in the picture were legally married to other people and had been charged with adultery. It was hoped that a photograph of them with their children would persuade authorities to drop the charges. However, the picture failed to raise sympathy and they were both jailed, leaving their fourteen-year-old son (upper left) to look after the family. Their sentence was commuted within the year, in response to an appeal by Nasser to the president of Lebanon. The original photograph is from the author's personal collection.

The author photo is by Elaire Frenette.

Some of these poems have appeared in Arc, Dandelion, Grain, Orbis (U.K.), Poetry Canada, and subTerrain.

Design and layout by Alan Siu.

Printed and bound by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

[e-mail]

This book is for Kamal

Contents

Dowries

Dowries

My Grandfather Dreams

Flight

Yellow flowers

No Account

Flash Back

White Wedding

Child with child

Love Poem

Gravity

Thanksgiving

Three nights of no sleep

Night Driving

You who have disappeared

The Year of the Coyote

Dirty Dream

Making Tabouli

Foreign Homes

Honeymoon Trip

Foreign Homes II

Eating a Pomegranate in the Bath

The New House

Night Feeding

The Cedar Chest

Badlands: the first day

Convergence

Leaving Home

Loose Feathers on Stone

Unmarked Grave

Survival

Heirlooms

Working for the Peytons

The blizzard is my name—

Sentences: at the Culls’

She is crying in a corner

Loose Feathers on Stone

Burial

Departures

Empty Seas

The Pleiades

Thieves

Clutter

Crystal Vase

The Fly and I

Another Winter Sunday

The Fly and I ii

The Fly and I iii

Driving Through the Mountains

Elk

Last Days

November, December, January

June is the month of funerals

Summer Solstice

Badlands: Retrospect

Thank-you Card

Migration

Open Windows

Thieves

Measurements

We were full

Biography

Dowries

Dowries

We have crossed borders to reach

each other and lost land

chafes our touch. I carry

snowshoes, winter wheat, raven call,

winter pocked by arsenic flakes from the mines.

You bring donkey sweat and spent bullets,

voices that shriek out, tear bright.

We offer them to each other—

gift and sacrifice.

My Grandfather Dreams

Wind rattles prairie ribs.

Flesh of cattle shrivels—