Review
Review of Second Growth
In her debut collection, Second Growth, Canadian poet Fabinne Calvert Filteau writes of planting trees in northern BC after clearcut, and about being the second growth daughter of a mother who attempted suicide throughout her childhood. She uses both traditional and experimental stanzas throughout the book. As someone who is less comfortable with anything other than left justified stanzas Second Growth as not only gained my admiration, but opened me up to reading more poetry that utilizes white space.
The frontispiece poem, “Prologue” begins “[w]e came for wilderness, bounding trail, rinds of trail/ slumping in in to stream bed, river mud hugging our shoes…” and then goes on to “we came for boombox static, heartless rock, flatulence/ of spun out tires”. The whole poem is one sentence which brings on a rush of things in nature, both the natural beauty and the man-made ugliness, which serves to introduce the reader to the landscape within Calvert Filteau’s collection.