Carole Chambers, From the Gulf

From all accounts, Carole Chambers was a remarkable woman: take the words and images of photographer Bob Cain, for example, or see her materials collected at the Hornby Island archives (which looks remarkable, so I'd love to visit).

Even if she wasn't, though, her poetry was lovely and accomplished and very much of its time and place: the 1970s, and BC's Gulf Islands. She regularly published inside collections, as well as sometimes in chapbooks, so it can be challenging to track down her work, but I'd encourage you to look for something like her 1992 chapbook From the Gulf.

With any profits going to the Save Georgia Straits Alliance (which I think became officially, a few years later, the Georgia Strait Alliance, this book's heart would be in the right place even if the individual poens' hearts weren't. To Chambers' credit, of course, these are intimate, thoughtful poems of feeling and close observation, and if it's a poetic language you're comfortable with, then these are poems you'll spend more time with you need to, just because they repay your attention.

But they are poems of their time, which means that they don't read like the poems that in the 2020s fill the pages of the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and the rest. For someone like me, who came of age reading work from writers of Chambers' generation (and therefore imitated their work as well, mostly unknowingly), these poems are deeply familiar even when they're new to me, and even when they don't work for me.

Writing of a foggy summer dawn, for example, in "White August":

The invisible sun marks no time,
the blank sky reveals
no secondary information,
no shadows or reflection.
Not bird or fish or human,
I am becoming the silence.
The moment does not move. (p20)

One of my great joys in teaching first-year literature courses at university is that I get to introduce my students to good writers who don't have much of a profile now, some of whom never had much profile. Chambers is one of those, in that she was a keystone member of the Hornby Island community, which means she was a known but somewhat peripheral member of the Gulf Islands literary community, and therefore a long way from whatever counted at the time as Canadian literary success. I don't expect that my students will fall in love with Chambers' work, but who knows!

This is good stuff, especially if you're mindful of time's passing and the accompanying change of fashions, and someone should always be reading the good stuff. I hope you consider reading Carole Chambers.