The Debt

By Andreae Callanan

Finalist for the 2022 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry • Shortlisted for the 2023 E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award

Set against the backdrop of a post-moratorium St. John’s, Newfoundland, The Debt explores tensions between tradition and innovation, and between past and present in a province unmoored by loss and grief. The Debt is about development and change, idleness and activism, ecological stewardship, feminism, motherhood, the personal and the political. It is also about resistance—against the encroaching forces of greed and capitalism, even against the accumulated notions of the self. The poems are an argument for community and connection in an age increasingly associated with isolation of the individual. The Debt explores the dues we all owe: to nature, to those who came before us, and to one another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771964180

Andreae Callanan

Andreae Callanan's poetry, essays, and reviews have been read in The Walrus, Canadian Notes and Queries, Canadian Verse 2, Riddle Fence, CBC.ca, and The Newfoundland Quarterly. She is a recent recipient of the Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and she holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship for her doctoral work in English literature. Her chapbook, Crown, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Andreae lives in St. John's with her husband and their four children.

Book preview

Promise

These are the rumours: rapturous

clash of sea-stones heaving

under the chill collapse

and pull of tide to shore, moss

padding the shaded forest

floor in deepest green shot

through with chartreuse

strands, the marshes inlaid

with autumn fruit. Time-carved

cathedrals of cliff,

congregations of gannets.

How many colours

pulse in a single shard

of Labrador feldspar? What

is the sound of twenty thousand

seabirds calling through silken

fog?

Promise me it isn’t all just wild

and wave-wracked

promise.

Crown

[We grant our trusty and wellbeloved servant … free liberty and license …] to discover, search, find out and view such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, countries, and territories [as are] not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people.

—Queen Elizabeth I, Charter to Sir Walter Raleigh: 1584, as read by Prince Charles to an assembled crowd in St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1983

What he meant was uncultured. What he meant

was bestial. What he meant was far-flung,

yes, but also improbable, as though

this place were mere outside chance. When the Crown

came, it came with baubles, with dancers, no

end to the gifts and tokens shared among

the fuss-hungry masses. The Crown was bent

on shoring up our love of monarchy.

At the bedrock edge of the Atlantic, the Crown saw ocean possessed by no one.

The Crown claimed it. Sometimes a ship goes down

and takes all hands; a man cannot outgun

an ocean. The Crown remembers frantic

spadework, the rush to plant a colony.

Planted in our little colony, we kept ourselves useful by keeping busy. Out of sight. Those were years of a quiet harbour, the White Fleet long gone and its dockside soccer matches long over, Tchau, Novos Mares! We were used- book shoplifters, record-store hangers-on in torn jeans and scuffed Army-Navy boots. War Memorial loiterers, Sharpie graffiti artists defacing the white chipped stone of the national monument, reasoning that the war dead, spared their gruesome end, would have done the same. The King and Country