Meghan Fandrich, Burning Sage

“Remember this moment. Breathe in deeply. Feel the beauty of this little place—because tomorrow, it will all be gone.” (p.9)

(Note: this review is in sections for a very particular reason. Lytton folk don’t have to read the first section; you know all those details, so you’re free to skip ahead. Anyone NOT connected with Lytton, though, needs to know what happened to this town. They need to know this before they can really understand what lies behind Meghan Fandrich’s remarkable book of poetry, but they also need to understand some of the specifics of what climate change—which we tend to think of as a future concern—is doing already to the land.)

1. The burning of Lytton, BC

Until 2021, the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada had happened during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, around 45 degrees Celsius (113F). And then suddenly, at the end of June in 2021, the little town of Lytton, British Columbia, found itself pinned under a heat dome.

On June 27th, the official temperature hit 46.6 Celsius; on the 28th, 47.9; on the 29th, a shocking 49.6. (For American readers, that’s 121.3 Fahrenheit: hotter than it has ever been in 46 of your 50 states.)

The next day might have been hotter yet, but we’ll never know.

Along with almost the entire town of Lytton, the weather station burned down on June 30, 2021, and so did Meghan Fandrich’s little haven the Klowa Art Cafe. (That’s the day before Canada Day, for anyone tracking the potential for various ironies here.)

The town evacuated in mere minutes that day, many of its residents barely escaping with their lives, and in the next few months, most of the evacuees had nowhere permanent to go. Some residents, though, Fandrich and her young daughter among them, were eventually able to return to homes that somehow hadn’t burned with the rest of their town.

But this was a mixed blessing, and not just because all the stores had burned, along with the homes of almost everyone else in Lytton. A few weeks later, another wildfire meant that the police asked everyone to evacuate again (though Fandrich and many other residents refused). In the fall, heavy rains from an atmospheric river brought down numerous hillsides, destroying multiple bridges along the Transcanada Highway and shutting down all road access for several weeks. In the winter, avalanches and heavy snowfall again shut down all road access.

Thirty months later, as it happens, construction has still barely begun in Lytton, which is a long story, and has brought an extra layer of pain for its residents. How much healing can have taken place, when the main street of your town remains a succession of ash-filled basements, fire-scorched brick walls, and melted steel doors? How can you build a sense of community when your roads and infrastructure reaches this level of instability, to what can seem a state of permanent impermanence?

2. Burning Sage: the book

Caitlin Press, who published Meghan Fandrich’s Burning Sage, has done a tremendous service in getting this book out into the world so quickly. Any small quibbles about ways that the book might’ve been more beautiful pale beside the crucial need for timeliness that, to its great credit, Caitlin lived up to. Fandrich began writing these poems after July 2022, more than a year after the Lytton fire, but Caitlin somehow had the volume into stores and into readers’ hands by the middle of 2023, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Loosely speaking, Burning Sage represents a narrative that spans roughly 16 months after the fire, but only in the sense that its sequencing of poems is loosely chronological. (If it’s narrative you want, then you’d best read some of Tyler Olsen’s truly impressive reporting.) Here, in spite of the underlying narrative logic, I found myself surprised at times to realize that a month or more had passed between the events of adjacent poems. In spite of its looking outward (for community, and at history and climate), Fandrich’s is a poetry of intimacy, of sensitivity, of nerves vibrating on the outside of one’s body.

The opening pages of Burning Sage give you glimpses of life before the fire, and the day that the town burned. We evacuate with Fandrich and her daughter, then catch glimpses of the struggles that come from having been evacuated:

“I had to buy toothpaste
got lost in the aisles
shapes blurred into colour
I couldn’t” (p.19)

“I stumble barefoot through nights and days” (p.20)

As the year goes on, we visit a few times with Fandrich the ruins of her cafe; we sit with her as she tries to face the insurance paperwork; we watch her tentatively enter into a new relationship, which comes as a surprise to her even before it goes in a direction she doesn’t expect. Life goes on, in other words, in spite of this mammoth life-changing trauma, and in turning her pages, we get to share and relive with Fandrich the turning of the months through the year-plus after Lytton’s trauma: after the trauma experienced by each person in Lytton, too, though Fandrich carefully doesn’t speak for them.

After all, this isn’t a climate-change wildfire version of Our Town, Fandrich as Thornton Wilder speaking on behalf of her community. As deeply as she feels herself embedded in Lytton, Burning Sage is Fandrich’s story, its poems the flashes of her own experiences, and she leaves others’ stories to their own telling.

To be honest, though, I think that her determination to speak precisely for herself is what makes the book more genuinely representative. That’s why her book made her such a great guest for Tom Power on his CBC series/podcast Q, as well as for Gloria Macarenko on CBC’s On the Coast. There’s no one else who can tell Fandrich’s stories, or articulate in verse what she went through. Through the uniqueness of her perspective, we can get at least the illusion of access to something like Lytton’s communal experience.

3. Burning Sage: the poems

I’ll say it again: Fandrich’s is a poetry of intimacy, of sensitivity, of nerves vibrating on the outside of one’s body.

I’ll always defend a writer’s decision to face up to emotion, however I feel about the result, even though it’s true that sometimes a writer’s emotional story isn’t accessible enough to their reader when being shared in just that way. That’s not at all how I feel about this book, though. Burning Sage has its roots in classic confessional poetry, I’d say, by which I mean in part that what might sound sentimental in these pages needs to be understood as inextricable from the context of trauma.

Take the very short “Morning,” for example:

(Am I the only one hearing in that last line, last verse paragraph, Shane McGowan and Kirsty MacColl in “Fairytale of New York”? Yes? Fine, carry on.)

Grief accumulates in each line of this brief lyric, every line revealing another facet or degree of challenge that comes from living through trauma. There’s a brief flicker of hope, if one were able to halt at “I am making pancakes” (yum, hurrah!), but no, of course one can’t, these pancakes are “from a box” (but why???) “for a squalling child” (oh no…) “in a burned-up town,” and so on. Twelve lines, thirty-nine words, and it’s a crushing little gem of agonies.

To be clear, Burning Sage isn’t an agonized collection, in spite of its many agonies, and even though it arose initially from trauma. Overall, the trend in these poems is toward resolution, toward something like acceptance, which can’t come without a great deal of healing. That’s an iterative process, so Fandrich steps forward and relapses, sometimes walks in circles, and follows parallel paths with uneven progress along them. As readers, we’re in the position of watching a person suffer and recover, exposed in all manner of ways, such as when Fandrich walks her daughter to school in the poem “Normal”:

“I can’t hear
the machinery
scraping our town away

if I don’t listen

I can’t see the shadows

if I don’t look” (p.74)

Because the narrative moves from the moment of trauma toward something like a new normal, Fandrich’s mode throughout these pages shifts from something more fragmentary toward something with declamatory echoes. I think it’s broadly accurate to say that these poems were written chronologically to match the events’ chronology, too (though they were of course edited together), and as a result, reading Burning Sage can feel a bit like listening to a poet’s voice emerge and evolve. That’s not fair to Fandrich’s artistry, because I’m confident that the shift in voice is intentional, but regardless, it’s tempting to read the book’s shifts that way.

And actually, in spite of this section title’s implied promise to talk about the poems, I don’t want to spend very much time on their details. More than that, I don’t want to get into the final poems at all, because I want to respect the book’s narrative. Absolutely it’s possible to pull out some lines to point at admiringly, and I’ve done a little of that here, but this book demands to be read as a single work.

We’re living in a new world, under climate change. I’m encouraged that John Vaillant’s Fire Weather has been so widely acclaimed, with his trenchant commentary on the trajectory of how Western cultures are responding to climate change, and I’d see Burning Sage as offering an important corollary to work like Vaillant’s.

In Burning Sage, Meghan Fandrich is showing us what it means to live through interlocking effects of highly local climate crises, and I think that her poetics and aesthetics would connect really well even with readers who don’t think of themselves as Poetry People.

To sum up by way of interrupting myself (so, so, so much I want to say!), it has been a long time since I read a poetry volume that so obviously deserves nomination to the BC Book Prizes.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve read this book a half-dozen times (sometimes slowly, sometimes in a more desultory way), and I’ve given away a few copies as well. If you read any of my other reviews here, you’ll notice that I tend to choose books that I’m likely to appreciate, because life’s short and I’m feeling that more intensely these days. It’s possible, in other words, that you may not think I’m being quite genuine in my praise of this book.

Genuinely, I’d love to see Meghan Fandrich’s Burning Sage makes it onto BC’s unofficial collective bookshelf, along with classics like Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel, M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, Bertrand Sinclair’s The Inverted Pyramid, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce, and other writers less easily represented by a single volume (Robert Service, George Manuel, Roderick Haig-Brown, Emily Carr…).

Beyond that, I want Burning Sage to find readers. I’m utterly confident that you don’t have to know anything about British Columbia before you could love this book, and as anchored as I am to this place, few things would make me happier than to hear from readers outside BC.

Seriously. Buy this book.