What Fills Your House Like Smoke
by E. McGregor
Published by Thistledown Press
$19.95 ISBN 9781771872522
I must admit, the title of E. (Erin) McGregor’s debut poetry collection — What Fills Your House Like Smoke — greatly piqued my interest. I’m partial to similes and metaphors, and McGregor’s title was a poetic hook — what, exactly, does fill this Winnipeg poet’s house with metaphorical smoke? I guessed that butterflies and sweet peas wouldn’t be at the heart of it.
McGregor holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and the sheer variety of poetic forms — prose poems; free verse; quatrains; couplets; concrete; and experimental, sound-oriented pieces — in the book is consistent with the range I’ve seen in other first books by creative writing students. What differentiates McGregor’s poetry, however, is its nearly singular focus on the theme of personal identity; often, first books “free range”
across themes and subjects. McGregor’s poems weave pain into a story.
McGregor is a “Euro-Settler/Métis,” and in her piece “Weeds”— another metaphor — she begins: “Don’t judge me too harshly/for not understanding the small things/that come with your blood”. In that same poem: “[white people] have me by the roots/it’s confusing”. The poet contends with her lineage, and, in particular, the maternal line, including her grandmother, Dora — to whom the book is
dedicated — and her mother, both of whom had “the drinking disease.” She writes of the hardships Dora faced, including an abusive husband who “beat her up and cleaned her out,/stole her dogs”. Of Dora’s siblings, she writes of “The streets of Toronto that swallowed one brother, the train/wheels in the Fraser Valley that bisected/another. The sea of alcohol/that could not be swum.”
The poems are real and raw — full of hangovers and lousy partners, class disparities and Death Apnea. And they’re credible, though the back cover copy claims the book’s “an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of [McGregor’s] grandmother.” I applaud this imagination. In the opening poem — “Instructions for the Death of a Grandmother” — McGregor writes about her
grandmother’s “gurgle-thick breaths,” and the poet wonders if Dora can smell “the stale alcohol” on her granddaughter’s skin. Hyperaware in the hours after death, McGregor considers “the way gas-bar lights make everything look silver” and she notes “the song that is playing on the radio.”At times grandmother and granddaughter are close, sharing “Japanese chicken wings and rice,” and other times they struggle with the “finding of things to give words to.”
The poems are set in a few different locations, including Edmonton (“Edmonton is a thin soup, at first”) and Winnipeg, with its “goose shit and shadows.” In Edmonton, Dora’s husband “retrieves her from toilet-stall floors/and carries her, like a hunter with his kill,/to the cold car”. This poet demonstrates deft, non-sentimental handling of intimate personal experience, poem after poem.
What fills this house with smoke? Bravery. Honesty. Curiosity. The matriarchal line contains all the strengths and “lesions” of three generations, and the youngest of these women — through examination, contemplation and literary skill — is doing her best to slowly clear the smoke, and understand who she is.
This book is available at your local bookstore or from the Saskatchewan Publishers Group www.skbooks.c
