It’s no small feat to slide out from under the baggage of cultural symbolism and avoid cliché. Brenda Schmidt does it in More Than Three Feet of Ice, where she renders what is commonplace in the hostile landscape of the Canadian North: the nature of isolation, and the infrequent but compelling moments of wonder that punctuate a lifetime. To her unforgiving environment Schmidt brings a painter’s scrutiny and an astute mind. Using numerous narrative voices, she evokes an alien world with such clarity that readers-even outsiders who have never been north of the book-could say they’ve lived there.
The title poem exposes both the fear and the passion that constant intimacy with danger of death creates:
the right-left crunch of fear, the possibility
one could break through then sink beneath
the ice foundation - life, nothing more
than a leather mitt’s slip, a brief frantic grasping,
but less obvious, perpendicular, an auger’s twist,
ice-scrape echoes, the sudden gush
when curved blade cuts into water.
The North is an implacable host to seekers who venture there. The normal standards do not apply. A newcomer’s ignorance is often costly, as “Lessons of Tyrell Lake” demonstrates:
Never wipe your ass with fire moss. It is not forgiving.
Fever rises from ash, from moss, an unstoppable blaze.
I heard it happened to a geologist just before
the fire swept through. At night he’d roll
around in his tent, trying to put himself out.
Even the experienced must take care. That the mindfulness essential to survival provides no guarantee of impunity is evident in “Nearly Drowned”:
Winter, too, makes its claims. Through the ice
much is lost. Years ago I learned to chop holes,
gauge the thickness, as if anyone can calculate
the weight a frozen body will bear. Still, I pause after
each step, my shadow stretching like a muscle as I look
for cracks, the weak patches, the open water snow hides.
And the resonance between the external and internal reveals that hazards are more than physical and don’t necessarily follow nature’s upturns, as is evident in the conclusion of the same poem:
It’s only February, yet
as I stand in the bush among waxwings
lifting berries, as the sun pushes yellow-tipped-tails
into my eyes, I find myself sinking.
The metaphors for the relentless toll on mental, spiritual, and emotional resources are often startling for their brutal beauty. In “Beneath the Skin of a Deer” early morning, a new beginning is likened to “a fresh-killed deer,” desire the one who “wields a steel blade.” “Blood should sodden the snow, / but blood in the dead gels in vessels / far from the heart. Pump an artery slit, / see what darkness blobs out.” The just-skinned “naked animal / seeps then freezes, an existence skinned, knife-nicked.”
Like the nature of existence which her work portrays, small hopes tantalize in the face of the seemingly impossible. Of a single fiddlehead discovered unfurled beside the trail, she writes, “Who knew expectation / could be wound so tightly around nothing and still grow?”
Even though the themes of longing and loss are wrenching, it is anything but a gloomy book. Sexual tension fairly singes the pages. In “Large Yellow Lady’s Slipper” we read, “You know better than to touch, but still your hand / reaches out to stroke the bloom.” In “Casualties” we see, “It’s been a stormy summer. / Hundreds of lightening strikes / set fire to more than trees.” And from “Fighting Fire”, “Remember the way fire leapt over the night / … / from the hill we sat on / and how your hair blew forward like a blaze? / The forest’s heat was nothing.”
But lovers inevitably part, and in “Another Genesis” find passion’s flip-side, desolation:
I can’t see your face or recall the weight
your body pressed into mine, or if it hurt
when the stick dug into my back that time
at the creek, but I remember the impression
in my skin, the tracks the stick left
all the way up to my neck.
Your tongue touched every one. I still feel it
wiggling up against the abrasions.
“Words to Another Forest Song” concludes the collection:
Here is the whole composition, its elements
wild notes struck; each tone - the rake of bark under bear claw,
the plop of water closing in on a frog’s escape, the sinking
of marsh marigold pollen - vibrates in the space left
between petals and the surface of what I don’t know.
Throughout More Than Three Feet of Ice, Schmidt reconfigures the commonplace elements of the North, what she knows, and what she doesn’t know to achieve startling nuances. In her hands the seemingly insignificant is imbued with meaning and becomes an extraordinary book.
Lynda Grace Philippsen (Books in Canada)
