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From the archives

Object Lessons

Lisa Alward’s debut collection

The Other Side of “Irish Eyes”

Brian Mulroney abroad and at home

But Is It Trash?

Evaluating art in the age of conspicuous consumption

 

I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth

but an omnium-gatherum of memories—whether amorphous and unloosed

from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though he’s again

playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre of life.

 

From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full daylight. Some

delight, others devastate, breaking through the frozen crust to re-inflame

buried pain. Still others flit past my inner eye like short-lived visual migraines.

Odd fragments seek me out in dreams, like last night’s. I held a younger

 

woman in my arms and told her I had paid a terrible price for not having children, but

she, with her two, should go on and fulfill her ambition. We found ourselves inside

a house under renovation. Behind a demolished wall, a laundry

had been discovered that easily could, we conjectured, be joined

 

to the kitchen. Outside there were explosions in the night sky, fireworks

in celebration of a Russian holiday, the face of a czar shattering

into icy glitter. And all the while the woman from next door was setting out,

onto her front porch as on a stage, three bottles of pink-tinted water.

 

Ruth Roach Pierson taught women’s history, feminist and post-colonial studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto from 1980 to 2001, and European and women’s history at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1970 to 1980. Since retiring she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was (BuschekBooks, 2002), Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2008, and Contrary (Tightrope Books, 2011). A fourth, Realignment, will appear from Palimpsest Press in 2015. She is the editor of the anthology of film poems I Found It at the Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014).

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