Contemporary Poetry

142 contemporary poetry

violence, it’s a taste for power / That amounts to contempt for the
body’.^21
Anne Szumigalski was known during her lifetime as a Canadian
poet but was born in London before emigrating in 1951 , and lived
in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from 1956 until her death. For a few
years before leaving for Canada she lived in North Wales. These
are not incidental facts – since the terrain of her poetry is fi lled with
what may be an unfamiliar landscape. A perception of strangeness
or making the familiar and commonplace somewhat uncanny is not
merely the experience of a different physical landscape, although
Szumigalski has a keen botanist’s eye. In an interview Szumigalski
stated that the prairie landscape is key not only to the content of
her poems, but more importantly as an enabling psychological
space:

I’ve lived in a lot of places and a lot of poems are about these

places. But on the other hand the whole of my work is so

much infl uenced by the prairie that even these would not

exist... Somehow the prairies have given me a sort of licence

its sort of... as though it were in fact a licence, a piece of

paper on which is written ‘Think as wide as you want to,

infi nite as the space up and down. Jump into it. Don’t confi ne

yourself.’ And I know that’s what I felt on the prairie, and I

know that it’s the foundation of all my poetry.^22

In the narratives of Szumigalski’s poetry there is sometimes a
degree of slippage as the story suddenly moves to unexpected sur-
realism. Take for example the elegy ‘A Celebration’, where the
focus on the grandmother’s calcifi ed knuckles becomes a fantastical
site of regeneration:

by September they poked out at the surface

a wide circle of little chalky stubs

*

when All Souls’ came we lighted

eighty of them for holy candles.^23