Stock-taking

The Time of Falling Apart 
by Wendy Donawa

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$22.95 / 9781998526307

Reviewed by Carellin Brooks

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Wendy Donawa’s new book of poetry begins this way: “On Thursday last my love and I drove north to Sidney to prepay our cremations.” This bald opening line from “That Sensible Planning-Ahead Thing” delineates the territory of this collection: the latter part of life, with all of its disappointments and consolations. Looking ahead—prepaying the cremation costs so heirs won’t have to—and also behind, the poet’s subjects in The Time of Falling Apart range from her own childhood all the way through to the demise of herself and her beloved.

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry books lately taking stock of lives lived. This makes sense: these poets have grown in expression through their previous books, and they clearly still have plenty to say about this stage in their own experience, or as Donawa wistfully chronicles it, “my life’s mid-point now far behind.” 

In “Not in the Same Way” the poet muses on her early Anglican upbringing, how she cannot believe in God but yet feels the missing place faith could have filled in her life. “To My Hand by Happenstance” reckons with the poet’s responsibility in relation to her colonizer forebears. An ivory netsuke figure passed down through the family is accidentally crushed underfoot, and Donawa realizes “I never questioned when I could, and now there is no one to ask.” Other poems also address this theme, bringing it more specifically to the Canadian context. The titles of such poems as “News of Graveyards Find the Settler” and “The Settler Digests Her Research” are self-explanatory. 

The Time of Falling Apart hops from topic to topic. I wished for a more specific through line, maybe the contrast between Donawa’s early life and her later one, or the “doubled lives” of having sets of twins, including her mother and aunt, in the family. “Delusional” addresses a now-adult son who disavowed her when she left his father, her searches for his address on Google Earth, her sending of gifts that are returned unopened.

Other poems bring glimpses of the poet’s early adult life—in Barbados with her Trinidadian husband, or bringing him home to meet her appalled yet supportive parents. These brief slices of another era gesture towards other stories that are not explored here. While I understand some personal experiences, especially those involving other people, are difficult to describe with both candour and care, they also get to the grit of a life and the way our choices come to define us. This can make poetry about singular lives relatable to others, and can also lend urgency to the poet’s work: an urgency missing here, in the luxury of slow contemplation. 

At times the poetry is merely beautiful. A line describing “the tide’s pebbly click and shush” from “To My Hand” stops the reader cold. I’ve always wondered how to describe that sound: Donawa gets it perfectly right. In doing so she conjures those beach walks, that exact sound of small stones sliding and clacking amongst the back-and-forth of little waves. In the best moments of her poetry, Donawa makes such exactitude seem effortless. 

The sense of place in this collection locates us precisely on the West Coast. Here are all of our coastal moments: the white “island ferry   almost empty” in the dark, as it chugs across the water. 

But then, inevitably, the dirge returns: for time past, for the sense of diminishing time to come. In “Scorch of Time” the poet references “the melancholy tasks / that trim our diminishing lives.” 

Yet Victoria-based Donawa (Thin Air of the Knowable) is not concerned only with the downsides of her own aging and the past she recalls into being. To catalogue this collection simply as a lament for the passage of time ignores the evidence of poems like “An Exuberance of Apples.” Lovers embrace, impatient, in a hallway: a riot of fruit spills between them, their hurry perfectly mimicking the couple’s. As another poem has it:

we aged have never felt more passionate.

We turn music way up, sprinkle excessive

cardamom, ginger, habanero pepper…

The razor’s edge of immanent loss

grows our appetites, voracious.

While Donawa’s poem imagines “the young… cringe” at such revelations, this reader simply nodded in recognition. If Donawa’s initial poem is to be believed, and why not, the type of preparations undertaken in the shadow of the inevitable death to come are prosaic, tidying-up operations. 

How much more splendid, in my view, to leave a record of the joys and tribulations of this exact time, this exact place, to celebrate what the poet references as her eighty-second year. It is perhaps inevitable that the above-quoted poem, the second last in the collection, references Dylan Thomas’ famous “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” For how will we go out, any of us? With the apples that “rollick all over the floor”—another of Donawa’s vivid descriptions—or in muted melancholy?  

As the second half of life brings its cargo of memorials and remembrances, as we accept that some of the people we love are gone and all will go, including at last and not least ourselves, Donawa’s words are a sorrowful accompaniment: “one day one of us        will wake reaching across an empty bed / before we remember.”

[Editor’s note: starting on October 10 in Nanaimo, Wendy Donawa will appear at a series of readings on Vancouver Island and in Vancouver.]

Carellin Brooks is the author of the poetry collection Learned (Book*hug, 2022) and four other books. She lives in Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Learned was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. Brooks has reviewed Eva Kolacz, Chalene Knight, Catherine Owen, Erin Steele, Jes Battis, Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram, and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
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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