An ‘otherwise normal conversation’
Parade of Storms
by Evelyn Lau
Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2025
$18.00 / 9781772142457
Reviewed by Al Rempel
*
At one point we started to wonder if the meteorologists were just sitting around and making up new names for fun; terms like “heat dome” and “atmospheric river” entered the news cycle and then everyday parlance. Evelyn Lau, in her tenth book of poetry, Parade of Storms, makes these new, not-so-normal weather patterns, along with the pandemic, both the backdrop and foreground of her masterful book of poetry.
Throughout this collection, Lau (Cactus Gardens) writes from a variety of speakers’ voices about the debris of our messy human experience: the relationships, the griefs, the final weeks of someone’s life, and the struggle to make sense of things, as well as the actual litter of our living in this world—the plastics, the Styrofoam, and the dumpster garbage. Lau’s Parade of Storms is mature, muscular writing, with a layered complexity that draws the reader in.
First, the set design. The “parade of storms” forms the foreground in many poems, as in the titular poem: “the rains fell/and kept falling like punishment./This is the end times, we all agreed —/saturated earth crumbling,” or in the poem “Atmospheric River,” “greedy for a glimpse of wreckage —/barge slammed against the seawall, containers/like a copper fort bricked against the sky.” In “Dull Emergency,” Lau recalls the pandemic and how startling ordinary things were: “agog at the novelty of a plane searing the sky/as if it were the first flight out of here.” And who can’t forget the strange colours the sun makes through forest fire smoke, “a shrivelled red dime in the sky”?
Other poems place the weather at the back of the stage, as in “Summer Break,” where “screens flicker with forest fires roaring…bruised colours banks/of smoke.” Lau’s use of the weather is more than staging, though, and more than context; it’s integral to these poems. There’s a deep resonance that happens between the storms and what her speakers and other characters are going through.
Some of Lau’s most powerful and touching poems in Parade of Storms are those that face illness, loss, and dying. In the collection’s first poem, “Post-Surgery,” an unnamed figure is “a downed beast with a waxen face/tethered with cords, wires, oxygen tubes,/punctured and stapled, slit open.” In “The Porcupine’s Heartbeat,” another character, or perhaps the same one, is on the final stretch: “Hail drilled the hospice grounds/the day you slumped over, didn’t have the strength/to lift the weight of your own head on its bent stalk… For weeks/this was the space we held, a glass house… Nobody told me:/when it’s over, I would sacrifice an entire summer//just for one more day.” Or, in “Fit, Fabulous, 50,” the narrator is in an operating room: “The sense of something not quite right —/tilted, askew. A fog in the brain —/mornings groping through mist flickering/with cinders.”
Other poems that capture the smells and contradictions of dying or convalescing are “MAiD,” “Waste,” and “Hospital.” In “Waste,” the poet points out the awkwardness that can happen at funerals or in hospital rooms: “The Lord God is always with us, the chaplain says/out of nowhere, spoiling an otherwise normal conversation.”
The sense of loss we experience isn’t found just in the hospital room. Relationships go south, heartbreaks affect us deeply. In “Fracture,” the narrator is “in bed/by noon… nursing the invisible fracture./He said he was leaving and, three weeks later,/he was gone.” In “House & Garden,” a love affair is painted with the glossiness of a magazine cover, where the lovers “grappled in dim rooms, bruised/each other through a haze of mini-bar vodka….” Leave my mind,” the speaker begs, trying to shake off the memories and perhaps jealousies that still crop up. Perhaps the same figure, in “Creature,” recalls a toxic relationship: “you contort your own face to mirror/his pleasure, to share his good fortune —/you distort your features/until you feel deformed.”
The contrast between the debris of our consumptive lifestyles and our desire to garland our lives with beauty is perhaps felt most keenly in a city like Vancouver, where the ocean and the mountains form a scenic backdrop, and inside, the overarching trees and cherry tree blossoms help soften the blow of the city’s stench. In “Kintsugi,” the Japanese term for repairing a broken vessel with precious metals, Lau likens human efforts to this process: “Here there is no end to what they would spend/on beauty. Planting, re-planting… The new year’s intention?/Just to stay on this side of the tracks,/where cherry blossoms mend the seams/of sidewalks… Yesterday you headed east, past the boundary —//tent cities, scorched parks… You trod/on sidewalks baked with excrement, slimed/with dumpster trash.”
It’s a human tendency to look for hope amidst the dark storms in our existence, whether it’s the unease caused by the real, imbalanced storms of climate change, or the internal ones. Lau doesn’t attempt to sew it all up at the end of Parade of Storms or provide easy answers. With some caution, she does point to poetry (or could one extend it to all art?) as a way forward: “What kind of work/is this, to pay attention to the lesser things?/Who said it was a blessing?” The piece, titled “Poetry,” closes with these two lines: “Nothing was left/to you, nothing given, and yet —” The final em dash hangs there, like a hopeful longing. Elsewhere, in “Singularity,” Lau writes: “Maybe this is your job for now, to idle/in the glare like a lizard, flicking your tongue/at words.”
Two powerful poems end Lau’s book. “The Year of the Rabbit” finds the speaker, who I can’t help but conflate with “the poet,” struggling to find the right words to say: “It was our last visit, our last meal/together, the last weekend of your life.” And in the end: “My hand kept rising/to press your chest, I couldn’t help it,/it was the only part of me that tried to say, Stay.” In “Sunspot,” the speaker goes snorkelling and her partner snorts “there is nothing in this lake… But there was the woman who passed us/at the boardwalk, beaming face turned to her companion —/The joy, she said, oh, the joy!” Two small, poignant moments that perhaps only a poet could see and record, and two of the many reasons Parade of Storms is well worth reading.
*
Sprocket is Al Rempel’s fourth book of poetry, composed entirely of breathless prose poems about his growing up years in Arnold, where you could ride your bike pretty much anywhere as long as you were home by supper. His previous books are Undiscovered Country, This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, and Understories, along with a handful of chapbooks. He’s also collaborated with other artists on a few video poems. See alrempel.com for more information. Al teaches physics and science in Prince George, on the beautiful, unceded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh. [Editor’s note: Al reviewed Susan Glickman, Russell Thornton, Patrick Friesen, and Christopher Levenson for BCR.]
*
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 online 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.
“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster