Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham is an unsettling reminder, an everywoman’s quest, to find and to understand the women of her lineage, their lost lives, their hopes, their names. Heirlooms are not enough: “a darning mushroom, / a tin of teaspoons. // Still the urge is for / story” (“Calling It Back to Me”, 3). From the first page, Graham goes in search for all the things that come together to make story, including the questions and the tensions, the conflicts that brought her maternal grandmothers to Canada’s prairies along with the colonialism that complicated their lives and the poet’s search.
The poetry is sparse, bare, leaving lots of white space on the page, which I imagine represents the unknown. So much white space. Couplets dominate, two lines working together or in opposition, run down the page in brief observations, thoughts cascading among discoveries found as in the 17-page title poem:
A small pink curl
of cloud.
No language
for any of it.
Edges of photographs
disintegrating.
Names on the census misspelled.
Creases erasing the facts
Sadly, Graham notes, “Sometimes / a family doesn’t have / a story-keeper”.
Graham probes birth certificates, census records, ship’s records, and photographs. She questions, “Just a married name”. She admits, “I miss the lives / I have not lived”. And she draws the poem to a close and opens the way for the second section of the collection, “The Great-Grandmothers:”
This is the reckoning process.
To be careful, precise
about my thanks.
Would they be happy,
Would they be dismayed
to see me here in this future.
Graham’s crisp writing carries us forward into the puzzle of the great-grandmothers, where she gives each one her own form and voice on the page. Each is distinct, but the veil that shrouds each one makes them unknowable. Whether from Northern Ireland, or the “old country” of Sophia Czyzowski, or the beauty of the Clyde, or the one wearing a babushka in a photo, enticed by the promises of Uncle Prokop (“You can work / for yourself / not have anyone / over you”), each is mother to many, each resilient. Each unique under the homesteader category, each eking out a tough living on the prairies, each living a hard life, which takes us to the third section, “Toward an Origin Story”, where:
Under Russia’s boot,
under England’s boot,
they sailed off
to become the boot
of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees –
Smoothly, Laurie D. Graham broadens the focus to include environmental degradation and loss – “every arable, pilfered inch” – as well as the poli-colonial attitude toward both homesteaders and Indigenous.
To read to whole review published in TNQ, please click here.
McClelland & Stewart Poetry, 2026
Kathryn MacDonald 