This is a collection of two women’s voices, speaking out (and in), layering images beautifully, and all encouraging the reader to look within (and without) in order to find her place in the universe. In the poems, though written by two different women, the themes that dance together, twirl apart, and then find one another again, are ones that deal with earth, mortality, art, and the quest for self and purpose.
The first section of the collection, “Earth Dreams” contains a cluster of poems that speak to landscape, both external and internal. In one of Mulcahy’s pieces, “entrances and exits: Lake Huron”, the poet writes of the ever-present “calendar of flesh and bone,” something we both embrace, as part of our human existence, but also something that causes us emotional and mental pain. The underlying suggestion is that we wait for spring (entrances) but sometimes find losses (exits) when we least expect them, causing us to lose our taste for living in the process. That there are deaths, losses, when we least expect it, can mar us forever or encourage us to change and shape-shift our own survival yet again. In Kemp’s “tree breathes”, the poet reminds her reader to “look/here/be/lost & found/the presence of things.” Again, in close contemplation of the natural world, of the wilderness outside us, we will find something of ourselves when we least expect it; a revelation of momentous simplicity, perhaps.
The second section of the collection, “Brush Strokes”, is dedicated to Diane Arbus, Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, and PK Page. The photograph of the black iris at the front of this section conjures up the work of O’Keefe, as is mirrored in Mulcahy’s “black iris”, a poem that embodies both iris and femininity”: a “purple gesture at dawn/a slow yawn/exposes/swollen lips/full of night’s dark kisses.” Here are words that conjure the beauty of O’Keefe’s own creations, nudging the reader to think of gender, sex, and creation. The beauty of Kemp’s “massif” is that the personality of Emily Carr is found in the landscape. Kemp searches Carr’s self-portrait with her own eyes, finds that the artist— that archetypal Canadian “wild woman of the woods”— “nags snarling weather into domestic peace, pets / the wind, sweeps down streaming cedar trunk”. In the end, Kemp writes that “The mountain inside recognizes the other out there.”
Whether writing of landscapes, of creativity, of life or death, both Kemp and Mulcahy have created a beautiful book of poems that speak voices, experiences that sometimes run parallel to one another, but often overlap in wondrous ways. Gathering Voices is definitely a collection that speaks loudly (and softly) to a reader’s heart.
Kim Fahner teaches English at Marymount Academy in Sudbury. She is a poet, having published You Must Imagine The Cold Here (Your Scrivener Press, 1997) and braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001). In the late 1990s, she was shortlisted for the Air Canada/CAA Award for Most Promising Canadian Writer Under 30. As well, she has had a number of poems and short stories published in various Canadian journals over the years, with her most recent publication being a story in Bluffs: Northeastern Ontario Stories from the Edge (Your Scrivener Press, 2006). She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and had the great pleasure of studying with Mr. Timothy Findley as her mentor, via the Humber School for Writers, in the late 1990s. Also in the 1990s, she published a poetry journal called like lemmings: poetry over the edge with fellow Sudbury writer, Melanie Marttila.