Discovery Passages

By Garry Thomas Morse

With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captain Vancouver’s original sailing route. These poems draw upon both written history and oral tradition to reflect all of the respective stories of the community, which vocally weave in and out of the dialogics of the text.

A dramatic symphony of many voices, Discovery Passages uncovers the political, commercial, intellectual and cultural subtexts of the Native ­language ban, the potlatch ban and the confiscation and sale of Aboriginal artifacts to museums by Indian agents, and how these actions affected the lives of both Native and non-Native inhabitants of the region. This displacement of language and artifacts reverberated as a profound cultural disjuncture on a personal level for the author’s ­people, the Kwakwaka’wakw, as their family and tribal possessions became at once both museum artifacts and a continuation of the ­tradition of memory through another language. Morse’s continuous poetic dialogue of “discovery” and “recovery” reaches as far as the Lenape, the original Native inhabitants of Mannahatta in what is now known as New York, and on across the Atlantic in pursuit of the European roots of the “Voyages of Discovery” in the works of Sappho, Socrates, Virgil and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, only to reappear on the American continent to find their psychotic apotheosis in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott.

With tales of Chiefs Billy Assu, Harry Assu and James Sewid; the ­family story “The Young Healer”; and transformed passages from Whitman, Pound, Williams and Bowering, Discovery Passages links Kwakwaka’wakw traditions of the past with contemporary poetic ­tradition in B.C. that encompasses the entire scope of ­relations between oral and vocal ­tradition, ancient ritual, historical ­contextuality and our continuing rites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772015652

Garry Thomas Morse

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages (finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire), and Prairie Harbour and Safety Sand. Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series, including Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks. Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including UBC. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Book preview

Enter < -

the myth of being clean. I too want to write those long clean lines like cedar

planks removed. Tree left, alive

The way it was always done …

now

silviculture

Yo, Silvus, say wa?

The rhetoric

of hidden whistles

& kelp reeds

wafts through

screaming mask

The latest myth

a dream

of being

clean

evoking awareness & sympathy with cedar-

plank pink salmon milking a morning farm

swishing

pale

white/wash

almost

so dreamy

& clean

‘makola

"mom

are those islands

or only

shadows?"

Keep Off The Grass

Out of the darkness

a string

of lights

emerge

garrulous

with at least a century

of illumination

About dark & boardwalk

totems

loom

endowed

with death

"They just

let them

fall

a part

That’s their way"

{ thus the deadest are the most in disrepair }

But

by

morning

across the planks

unpetrified

they

provide

the

light

Fin-de-siècle Renaissance

SpencerHudsonfresh

waterdamfish

canneryrows

A little ornery

one afternoon

my mother:

"No way

you wanna

know

what they can …"

Dead. Trees. Now

Ecological Park

We cross the board walk. Water

bottle. Sole muck. Think I hear

my heart. Gwa’wina. A pair of

ravens their rhythmic flap of

wing startles the witches’ hair

moss. An

obligatory

raucous

croak

followed by

rather dramatic

mimesis

in reflection

maybe

something

heard

on a passing

speaker

another

bird

then …

SwampCedarsSilence

all’erta

in

alert

bay

the

absence

of

car

alarms

almost

alarms

Envoy

P’alxala

has come

to the coast. Allow me

to uncork

one or two

chimaeras

even a few

smelt

in my soul-

catcher

Still

a

drop

left

Through the fog

it

wanders

outside

beside

my

self

Mind

how you go

This creature

casts

its own

shadows

hungry for rows of crows along power lines

like

argillite carved, seaborn

charged

with/

out

meaning

Lightless tonight

mind how you carry

home the kerfed box

of watertight objects

& no longer advise

me how to handle

my

own

particulars

Potlatch

You forget

I am other

MultitudesI

don’t know

you want

the hollowed

bottom

of a

box

nor bleeding

chunks

of theatrical

meat

Perhaps you prefer the smoke

the tenderizing of flesh amid

suffused fog

But I am yet young-

blood

gnawing

at corners

of concrete

regurgitating

a potluck

combo

of uninitiates

in waiting

room

Yup, we are just

waiting …

Amid

apparitions

&disappearances

&

return

you forget

the Chinook

This too

is a

gift

Conversations with Remarkable Elders

Dodie doesn’t know her own

people, so to speak, high res.

schools & so on & so forth …

Terms

like that chief

tells

us bum indians

who we

are

escape

her lips

Dodie has a sense of humour

The water’s good. Real good. Try

the water. They wanted to chlorinate

our water. They took a survey. Our

mayor said bleep bleep. You know

what you can bleepin’ do with your

chlorinated water, even a whiff of

the stuff makes me hurl

signed

etc, etc.

Water in Campbell River’s the shits

They cut down the fucken trees.

Used to be all green far as the eye could see

What’s more they cut ’em all down by

the highway. That’s what happened

with the Amazon

Flash

floods

Damn Chilean wanted to burn

down the U’mista. Good thing

they got alarms. They gave him

two years for arson. Arson! How

’bout ten? Same’s as burnin’

down a church. If he’d burned

down U’mista, I would have

strung

him up

by

the

nuts

Trouble is there’s no more