Naming

Description

In 1984 Thunder Bay poet Elizabeth Kouhi published her first volume of poems with Penumbra Press, *Round Trip Home*. While concentrating more on writing for children in the intervening ten years, she has nevertheless continued to write poems about the peculiar northness that informs her own life as a Canadian-born daughter of Finnish immigrants. In *Naming*, Kouhi reconsiders not only her childhood search but an entire community's collective struggle to find Home. In the first section we are introduced to pioneers who talk at kitchen tables about coffee and bread, weddings and dances, coffins and funerals. In section two we become tourists, gliding > 'like skittering waterbugs over still > water, occasionally pulled by tag-ends > of history.' In the third section we dance with contrapuntal images of the arts - music, poetry, painting, sculpture - which she views as endangered species. In the last section we return like refugees to green woods, northern gardens, and grandchildren.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Penumbra Press poetry series ;
• no. 36