It Moves

Helen Humphreys’s The River pays homage to a Canadian preoccupation with how landscape sculpts the country’s imagination. Canada’s rivers perform as arteries and veins in this country’s body, a conceit that Humphreys uses to fine effect in her meditation on the Napanee River, a river that she lives beside, swims in and observes. The more subtle aspect of this intense and deliberated work is the intelligent distillation that this river is as indifferent to her scrutiny as she is scrupulous in her observation.

Humphreys’s observation that “Nature was a proper noun, with a capital N” establishes her careful distance and yet respect for nature. She does not say overtly that we now approach nature as a body we have the right to autopsy, our surveillance akin to that we give to an animal we have accidentally run over, our sorrow at its dying and a mea culpa–esque regard rotating around our own reactions and sensibilities. We are the dangerous animal, our...