Black Umbrella Reviewed By Christopher Levenson of The BC Review

How much do readers of poetry want, let alone need, to know about other people’s intimate family lives? Fiction has always explored the domestic world, but poetry…? Whereas in English language poetry it was fine for male writers to strut their erotic stuff, traditionally women poets have been allowed to bare their hearts, but nothing more. Everything else was sanitized or suppressed. But women poets have come a long way in the past sixty years.

This is due in part to the emergence of so-called Confessional Poets (a label never adopted by the poets themselves) which had its origins in 1956 in Ginsberg’s Howl. Even if Howl itself contained more boasting than confession, thereafter no language was too crude and no hitherto taboo subject matter was off limits. It was followed by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), by W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959), and then by the work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and in Canada by Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics (1971).

Saskatoon poet Katherine Lawrence. Photo by Randy Burton. Courtesy Contemplative Arts Festival, Saskatoon

Katherine Lawrence’s latest work then has a powerful provenance. Most of these poems provide a closeup of fraught family relationships witnessed by the poet over the long haul. What she evokes in the motifs of the mother’s continual affairs and the much loved but absent and later remarrying father could so easily have been “confessional,” but it is not. Time and again she impresses by the confidence and dexterity with which she absorbs, adapts, and repurposes these influences as the ground bass for her own very individual ends. The rawness of the situations and the strength of the mixed feelings involved, even decades later, are filtered through her own adult experience of parenting and held at a distance by irony, careful framing, and a kind of wit not too common in Canadian poetry. Read the full review here.