Settling into place
What is Broken Binds Us
by Lorne Daniel
Calgary: U Calgary Press, 2025
$18.99 / 9781773856391
Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch
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In the Japanese practice of kintsugi, broken porcelain is mended with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. As an expression of the Zen principle of the unity of all things, including the ugly, the resulting objects are recognized as holding more beauty than the unbroken originals.
In What is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel uses poetry to mend the emotional and physical breakage of contemporary human identity. These are blended performances, both textual and oral. Like kintsugi, many are broken. The poem “The Breaks,” for example, is a script for an open mic, in a performance controlled by broken breathing:
Just like that, like nothing, my eyes open
level with paving
stones. Red brick. Pocked red brick.
Unmoving.
That is just one of the poem’s many voices. All embody fine gradations of awareness. Often, the shifts between them are sudden. Daniel’s jump to the next lines of “The Breaks” is a good example:
I am him. He is here. Someone
else
gone.
This identity is not a modern, isolate self making its fractured passage through the world into a continuous narrative. It’s not memoir. Instead, any continuing identity present is the rhythm of poetry in a book of poetry as healing, all carried on an oral voice—on breath. These poems need people.
Their healing extends far beyond the personal. In “What Has Taken Place,” for example, Daniel puns on the ambiguity between “taken place” and “taken,” to present the shards of settlement in Victoria. This city, written over Indigenous space, is itself shifted from firm footing into “ this capital named for a 19th century head / of the house of Hanover.”
Such unsettling of romantic notions of settlement applies not just to Victoria but to Daniel’s family history itself. As he recounts, it too is a collection of shards, “300 years of plowing ‘forward’” from the Carolinas to Arkansas, Illinois, California, Washington, Alberta and now Victoria. There, Daniel (Living in Stone) recognizes himself as “—driftwood—on the shore’s shifting line.”
Everything can be viewed two ways in Daniel’s work. It’s the attention that matters. Personal history is not just a story of breakage but also a glue of lacquer and gold dust that heals both broken histories and the breakage that is history itself. The path Daniel takes to get there is through the sacred intention of accepting gifts of landings and learning their contours. Driftwood doesn’t plow forward, after all. It rocks back and forth as it settles into place. Daniel embodies the action by kneeling while working on an art project being laid on a road through Garry oaks, a local story of “wolf ~ salmon ~ cams ~ orca / bright with the pulse of generations.”
Such attention is more than human. Daniel recognizes it, for example, in “a good run of Chum up Goldstream” (from “When the Tributaries Ran Rich”). The kintsugi of this poem lies in how it glues dogs chasing sticks on the shore “for no reason” with people, Daniel included, gazing “through mist toward what we hold / to be mountains, unmoored.” There’s faith in that, “As if / following some magnetic field, pulled / to a distant ache, origin unknown.”
Present as well is a reluctance to fully become the salmon. In place of such self-identification, there’s the poem itself, a consciousness with an “As if.”
As the book flows on, that real metaphoric stream of gold reveals itself to be hard won. For instance, in the long series “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” the life that began as his breath is now the land beneath his feet, shifting geologically. There are thirteen shards of attention in this series about Daniel’s troubled son’s battle with addictions and separation.
In the end, the sequence leads to a fine Cascadian acknowledgement of the tenuous nature of solid land on a geological zone of subduction and fracture. The past, North America, and all Daniel has held onto are disappearing.
Breakage seems inevitable. In the seventh section, titled Calls from Across the Continent, for example, Daniel’s clear narrative voice is continually broken by ugly, graceless calls from his son, with groans and even vomit as part of the poem’s performance. The calm, adult speaking voice is broken, continually.
The connection with Daniel’s son is unbreakable, though. By the end, searching for him, “Bearded, heavy, drooped, / shuffling. His broad back / a continent, moving slowly away,” Daniel tellingly looks both ways and finds himself “thinking / something about hope” and walking “up the dark street / he is coming down.”
It is a repeated them: Janus, the Roman god of doorways, looking both ahead and behind, a fixed gaze anyone passes through, both coming and going.
In such doubling and double meaning, it’s less the gluing of kintsugi that matters than the mysterious call across it that land, salmon, people and even dogs all recognize: life calling out to life, messy and broken but present. In this spirit, the poems are performances of an energy that preceded them and carries on after they are spoken or read. They are moments of touch that invite readers to touch back. They also provide some practical advice on life, such as (in “To Carry an Absence”):
To carry an absence, learn to lean
a little, not so anyone might notice, but just
to feel a certain balance shift.
It’s a wise comment on the weight of poetic lines, too, and how to carry their breaks. Daniel is a fine craftsman, both of poetry and the broken (and then healed) heart. His poems are alive on the page. They are gifts.
[Editor’s note: Along with Joanna Streetly (All of Us Hidden), Lorne Daniel will launch What is Broken Binds Us in Victoria on October 7, 7pm, KWENCH Kanteen (2031 Store Street, Suite A). A free event.]
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[Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has recently reviewed books by Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, Hari Alluri, Brian Day, Jason Emde, John Givins, DC Reid, Kim Trainor, Dallas Hunt, and Tim Bowling for BCR. His newest book, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]
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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