Becoming the wind
The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2025
$25.00 / 9780771014017
Reviewed by Brooke Lee
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Billy-Ray Belcourt delivers a carefully crafted account—historically shared, authentically lived, and utopically dreamed—in his latest poetry collection The Idea of an Entire Life. Its reading is to follow a recurring act of self-discovery in the examination of glimmering potential contrasted against the starkness of reality—also, of how one’s perspective and outlook can colour, as well as shade, such lived experiences. “I’ve been happiest when my life feels like autofiction,” he writes.
Belcourt, a UBC prof from the Driftpile Cree Nation, is the author of This World is Wound—for which he became the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize at the age of twenty-three—as well as A History of My Brief Body, A Minor Chorus, and coexistence. In his latest work, he again unlocks the gate to higher education through the accessibility of his verse, opening that gate even further with a decolonization of language and a reclamation of voice in indigenous storytelling. As “Fieldnotes” exclaims, “We are not citizens of a country. We are citizens of a century.”
Marked by craftsmanship, with the deft hand of a poet and academic, thematic intrigue is weaved throughout the collection, making for repeatable readability. Whispers toward the interconnectedness of humanity and nature are heard often: the destruction of a people–with a focus on the Driftpile Cree Nation–in parallel with the destruction of the environment. The conversations with Kokum (Cree for grandmother) do well to embody this, as she represents both an historical and ancestral legacy, as well as Belcourt’s own future. We first meet her in one of the “Endnotes” pieces, musing the concept of heaven, and, in “Fieldnotes,” we last hear about her as a reminder of time’s passage: “In July, it was hotter than it’s ever been in my kokum’s lifetime.”
Though non-linear, much like the stages of grief, Belcourt’s perspective matures as the collection progresses; his worldview grows more focused as he highlights the responsibility of the modern individual—all of us subjects of the twentieth century—and asks: how will we contribute to the collective consciousness of a shared trauma? In “Fieldnotes,” Belcourt calls on a ‘Properly Political Concept of Love’: “‘The too-closeness of the world,’ wrote Lauren Berlant. We want a world, but we can’t bear it.”
Abundant but not dense, and intellectual yet accessible, this essay-adjacent book of poems educates, true to Belcourt’s form, drawing upon scholars such as Roland Barthes—a favourite as mentioned in his interview with Tin House’s Between the Covers podcast (about his debut novel A Minor Chorus). In The Idea of an Entire Life, Belcourt pays the most tribute to the notion of queer futurity from José Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. In “Cruising Utopia Sonnets,” Belcourt segues each one (of fourteen) with the scaffolding of a seasoned instructor. This section is particularly demonstrative of the book’s temporality theme in its depiction of time as cyclical–past and future in tandem with the illusive present in the way that a life is composed of memories, experiences, and expectations.
“I am serious when it comes to desire,” he writes in “The Past Tense,” “if only because a man is a difficult thing to dwell inside of.” At the centre of Belcourt’s collection are the overlapping, often clashing intersectional politics of masculinity and queer male desire from the perspective of an indigenous man. From “Utopia”: “The men I met were aroused by the world; I was aroused by the opposite of the world.” He touches candidly upon issues of secrecy and guardedness, violence even, as well as the fine line between tolerance and the–often confusing–perpetuation of power dynamics both in and out of the bedroom. “No one wants to be a historian of their own marginalization,” observes “A Prayer,” “but here I am again, hello.”
Thrumming with lyricism and references to poetic verse, such as, “Two men huddle together in a frozen lake, like a couplet” in “Endnotes,” repetition permeates the collection, with utopia referenced in two different titles, likewise: “Autofiction,” “Endnotes,” and “20th-Century Cree History” all appear twice as titles; and Belcourt plunges below the surface for answers with “Subjugated Knowledge” and “Subartica.” “Fieldnotes,” which recalls “Notes from the Field,” the subtitle of his NDN Coping Mechanisms, recurs four times as a title, perhaps doubling down on the importance of first-hand, lived experiences in addition to the theoretical component of social research.
A forgiving tone flickers throughout the collection, most notedly in Belcourt’s interactions with settler correspondence—one of which being a blackout poem, an act of self-liberation. He also considers, in “Fieldnotes,” his own eulogy: “His biggest regret was that he wasn’t the wind.” He appears in solidarity again with nature and the environment, ever-threatened by humanity, whether in a direct sense or a complicit one.
The Idea of an Entire Life encapsulates what it means to live with courage, honesty, and resilience—to be in the present moment, no matter how daunting it may seem: As presented in “Autofiction”: “A native truth: the present is as beautiful as it is brutal.”
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Brooke Lee (she/her) is a freelance writer and editor in Montreal who writes fiction under the pen name River Lee. For more info, visit her website at riverleewriter.ca. [Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Brooke Lee’s words to BCR. This is her first review for us!]
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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 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