To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

anch: "The rest was soon history swaggering
in rude adolescence around corners,
predictable as the black Cinzano ash trays
cluttering Ajaz's oil-cloth table and her coffee
thick as Cowhichan sweaters, predictable
as warm wet chinook winds licking
at winter and aurora borealis fooling with
the night sky, predictable as hucking
manure and haying."
The appeal of Hamilton's characters—
their cynical, irritable glee—arises from
their intuition that they can no longer be
fooled by the "mere promise" of hope. "On
Morris Hill" moves away from mothering
in the heterosexual nuclear family (and
beyond the patriarchal focus on the role of
the father in the "The Names of the
Constellations" ) to mothering in a lesbian
relationship. Anna is on the staff of a treatment
centre for autistic children. Marion is
a divorced social worker whose autistic son,
Sammy, gains the love of Anna. Love spills
over, uncontainable in this story, just as
Sammy, who is unable to behave like "normal"
people, spills over with his exceptional
being in the world. But the impulse
to cruelty and violence is not overcome
simply because the people in the relationship
are lesbians. Anna loses control and
strikes out at Sammy. The struggle that the
two women and Sammy must undertake to
make things work continues indefinitely, with
passion and the recognition of human imperfection—a
recognition accumulated from
surviving family and social conventions.
Release from a host of spectres—
parental, sexual and emotional abuse, sexual
infidelity—is found through catharsis.
"The earth is quaking," remarks the narrator
of "Shelter," writing in her journal while
she is a resident of a transition house, "Can
no one else feel it?" Change, especially the
deepest emotional change, can often feel
like an earthquake. But Hamilton never
leaves us staring at the black holes; she
expresses a bittersweet touch, a dark humour
that makes us care about these characters
and their situations. There isn't much more
that a good writer can want for her work
than this vital link with her readers.
Masque without Revels
George McWhirter
A Staircase For All Souls: The British Columbia
Suite, A Wooded Masque for Readers and
Listeners. Oolichan $10.95
Reviewed by Manina Jones
In one sense, A Staircase for All Souls is a
throwback to traditional Romantic nature
poetry in which the natural world, whether
it is a garden, golf course, or, most often,
British Columbian forest, becomes "a staircase
for all souls," the subject of a series of
meditations that allows the poet both
ascent and descent, transport into the sensual
as well as the spiritual realm. To borrow
a phrase used by the B.C. tourist
industry, McWhirter sees the landscape as
"Super. Natural." Indeed, the volume's
transformation of British Columbian terrain
into a mythical locale might almost be
an advertisement for the province's natural
wonders, except that its language so seldom
bears the traces of specific region, the feeling
of a unique place and time. The poems
at several moments deal with the Irish
immigrant's experience of Canadian
nature, designating the New World a paradise
discovered by "St. Christopher
Columbus," investing it with a timeless
numinousness and its settlement with a
nostalgia that some might find unsettling
in these times of environmental, cultural
and historical crisis. Indeed, in reading All
Souls, I am haunted by the spectre of what
it ignores, such as the devastation of clearcut
logging, or the vehement responses of
First Nations people to the notion of a New
World paradise created for post-Columbian
human exploration and exploitation. The
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