‘Always in flux’

Soft Shelters
by Marie Metaphor Specht

Norfolk County, ON: Write Bloody North, 2023
$20.00 / 9781778162619

Reviewed by Mary Ann Moore

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Marie Metaphor Specht is a fine spoken word artist who is also the current Poet Laureate of Victoria. Followers of her work will be glad to savour the printed version of her poems in this debut collection, as will readers new to her work.

Specht says her theme of shelters relates to a period of transformation in her life, “a time of reconciling disparate selves.” She understands the power of liminal spaces (which could apply to poetry as well) and “allowing the old to shelter with the new; like a tree earning its rings, our past selves never really leave us.”

They’re a challenge to take on, those disparate selves, and Specht has done it beautifully with poems in a variety of forms.

In the opening poem, “How Beautifully We are (Un)Made,” the speaker often forgets she is sheltered, until she wraps her body with a cloth woven from the “star trails of my ancestors.” While “bright strands of their love” may have unravelled, the speaker continues:

I shuttle the weft of their offerings
across the warp of those who came before.
They twine to an indigo fabric
always in flux.

The speaker’s “raw edge” and “bright filaments” are offered as “a dismantled shelter” in the hands of “each tiny love / and each vast love.” 

Specht has “learned that coming undone is an important part of becoming, and this work never ends.” This work can’t be done on one’s own, Specht has realized; she has discovered “the incredible strength to be found in softness—in the soft ways we shelter each other.”

While shelter is the theme of these poems, grief and loss are persistent refrains.

The Body is a Shelter, the book’s first section, begins with “Victory of Growing Things.” Although the speaker has found “so much evidence / of my body breaking,” willow boughs offer hope: “to find strength in softness.”

Specht writes of becoming and being a mother, such as in “Postpartum”: 

My sleepwalker-nightstalker body
a creaking vessel
       —marvel at the flood-beaten ark of these bones—

Against all odds I hammer it together,
a careful shelter to ride out this storm.

The speaker has been stretched into a new form, has had to “hammer” a shelter into place, as she learns to be careful with herself.

With some poems—“How to Write a Poem About Becoming a Mother,” “How to Dress for Your Breakup”—the poet offers instructions. In the latter, the best advice is saved for the end (of the poem and the relationship):

Before you set out,
fold a favoured poem small enough
to hide against your skin:
accepting beauty as your birthright.
Remember, it is not vanity
to love yourself enough to leave.

Elsewhere, in “A Body, Singing,” the speaker describes their body: “Bliss is the women, the enbys / carried by its song.”

And later:

This desire is a slippery, moving thing,
it can be hard to find
exactly where it rests in my body
because I never quite felt queer enough
to discover the subtleties of its gravity,
the soft way this love could invade my tongue.

The speaker concludes: “It’s such a suffering sort of ecstasy, / this germination.”

One of the poems about home is “Smoking with Prufrock,” which features epigraphs by T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf that reference domestic objects and practices—tea for Eliot, a coffee cup for Woolf. The speaker’s environment includes “a congregation of dishes,” “unfolded laundry drifts,” and “to-do lists [that] breed like sentient, tender rabbits.” The willow boughs “dance sunlight / and shadow across our living room / have born[e] witness to many restrained battles.”

While germination is noted in “A Body, Singing,” here “Each fight is an alien seed we cannot plant.”

The narrator, usually a non-smoker, has created a secret ceremony for one, “private and without guilt.”

There has been suffering and there is acceptance, a standing up for one’s self.

References to “makeshift safety” (“Prelude to an Apocalypse”) and “a soft moment of refuge” (“Rather, I Worry”) are noted in the poems included in the section Questions for the Slow Apocalypse. The poem from which the section takes its name ends its series of questions with: “Tell me, how are you surviving this?”

“Becoming mother, becoming home, becoming still, becoming okay” are related to Specht’s period of transformation, “a state of undoing and becoming right up until the very end.”

In the final section, The Alchemy of Becoming More, the willow appears again as a shelter for “a careful little womb / of spiderweb, dryer lint and lichen.”

The empty nest, once holding two tiny eggs, was found in the garden:

Just an empty mouth, wilted
from holding so much in,
stretched from holding on,
softened by the alchemy of becoming more.

“Soft Shelters,” the final poem, reminds me of Lorna Crozier’s “Packing for the Future: Instructions.”

In Marie Metaphor Specht’s case, the objects are “household sheets and pillows” as well as “the baby blanket pulled from storage.” There’s also “the quilt that carried your grief” and garments from father, mother, and Grandfather (plus “Grandmother’s umbrella”).  

Perhaps the speaker of the poem is inviting a new love in or the reader as well as affirming her own resilience to herself. 

To build a shelter in the eye of the storm,
use only the softest materials.

There’s a promise in the end:

Come in love,
      and let the storm be,
I promise our soft shelter will hold.

“Poetry is a way of reaching towards each other; of closing the spaces between us,” says Specht in her Poet Laureate position. And I can’t help but think of poetry as a form of shelter, a haven in the midst of the swirl around us, the unravelling.

Mary Ann Moore is a poet, writer, and writing mentor who lives on the unceded lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo. Her recent chapbook of poems is Mending (house of appleton). Moore leads writing circles and has two writing resources: Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey (International Association for Journal Writing) and Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice (Flying Mermaids Studio). [Editor’s note: Mary Ann Moore has also reviewed books by Emily Carr (ed., Ann-Lee Switzer), Aislinn Hunter (ed.), Emma FitzGerald, Susan Alexander & Lorraine Gane, Judy LeBlanc, Kayla Czaga, and Christine Lowther for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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