Creekstone Press

Northern BC's publisher

Creekstone Press Publications

Second Growth

Description: 112 pages, trade paperback, 5.5" x 8"

ISBN: 9781928195009

Price: $ 18

Gillian Wigmore writes about this new collection of poetry:

I can't tell you how long I've waited for this voice out of the north.

Like Atwood, Fabienne Calvert Filteau doesn't ask for permission to see and speak in a new way; like Lilburn, her reverence for and her place within the natural world is the paramount question; like McKay, inevitably the humour and humanity seep through:
                             stumps like gopher heads
                          peek through the un-grove,
                            a colony of question marks
                         sawed off at the knees

Where others might praise or lament, Calvert Filteau never goes for the easy eco-poem. Her poems self-lacerate as much as they live and breathe - they celebrate and grieve in equal measure. The honesty and hard labour of each particle gathered and translated in these poems show the poet's familiarity with the heartbreaking inheritance that is a life on the land in the north, that is the daughter's DNA, that is the sister's and the lover's truth. Calvert Filteau doesn't flinch and she doesn't pull her punches; in every word of every poem we know her gratitude for her place and her respect for a land that lies in wait to pounce.

Shape-shifters and body-borrowers inhabit these poems; a tongue's quest through the body to find roots; a tree-bodied, moose-toothed woman turns to paper; the stitched seams of creeks across a clearcut are a map of a human body or the path of a life. The originality and new vision in these poems is stunning. Stories abound, 'like the meandering fibres of muscle/... somehow woven with the weft of every other.' Calvert Filteau is already a master of humility within the lament. I envy her eye and I feel privileged to read a new poet
                      ...plant herself
                 in the leached soil, the toxic earth,
                      ...bend over
                shove her hands in the dirt
                take root

Now we watch her bloom.

Read excerpts from Second Growth