Review of Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal by Leanne Boschman (Review published in Existere — Journal of Arts and Literature, Fall 2009 / Winter 2010, Vol 29.1)
Reviewed by Ofelia Legaspi
Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal begins with an impressionistic foreword. Recurring phrases travel the page like waves lapping over each other. Words are visually aqueous, spilling characters and raining globules of lost meanings in the white space below. This pictoric representation of rain is followed by a playful acknowledgements page that is orthographically recast.
Boschman here composes a poetic dedication, not to people, but to the muses and moments that embolden her poems – from the “oilypuddles” formed after the seafest parade to the karaoke announcer “for letting / everyone singtheirsong.” This compounding of words and the spatial pauses in this prelude introduce us to the language and rhythm of the collection, to words swept together in an organic marrying that creates a new light around their meaning. Her poetry has a glazed look on everything as in after a rain, and creates the impression of memories washing away, floating along and revealing the aftermath: the beauty of stranded moments.
Boschman’s setting sutures stories. As she announces, the book is steep with local history, not of a textbook kind, but of private lives in the backdrop of a budding cityscape, inclement weather, and doubts. Boschman begins with a place – Prince Rupert, British Columbia – at a time when everything about is embryonic. The first part of the collection starts off with verses of hope in putting down roots and pioneering a place where rain “begins incoherent” and everything “rusts and rots as fast as men can build.” This place is born to many women, one of which a schoolteacher discovering her first maternal want during her first posting in Prince Rupert. “City Mothers” documents pursuits of family who defied their traditional role and did more than “birthing, cleaning, and feeding / in those settlement days.” One poem also explored the father of the Prince Rupert dream – Charles Hayes’ plan to bring progress to the city through the Grand Trunk Railway – and the hope living on despite Hayes sinking with the RMS Titanic in 1912. These are poems of hard but good beginnings, but it is “only a matter of time before a roaring / torrent is unleashed.” These lines prophesize the inevitable clouds that would give the place darkness – missing women, murders and exile.
The rest of the book is a tableau of the place – its physical and emotional landscapes. These poems speak of setting in visually unusual ways: through titles of paintings (“Reclining Forests – Caranaby Sawmill / Solemnity of Brown Hills after Pine Beetle”) and the overlay of surreal, theatrical light in the natural, making it a surprising, foreign image (“as if hoisted up by cables huge / ambermoon clambers above mountain peaks that soon / gleam with several coatings of white”). Boschman in this collection shows how timing her words can create impressions (“tarpaper shingles branches / launched against the roof”) and unorthodox use of punctuation can transport you closer to the tactile world (“trumpeter swan’s call counter- / point with waves lapping, , , , , , , , / rains tapandpatter on the roof”). Appropriately, the author ends the book the way she started: with a barrage of images and movement that simulate the baptism of this place by water.
(Precipitous Sign: A Rain Journal by Leanne Boschman is published by Leaf Press. ISBN: 978-0-9783879-9-0)
