‘This is how it is in life / and death’

I Would Like To Say Thank You
by Joseph Dandurand

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$19.95 / 9780889714908

November, November
by Isabella Wang

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$19.95 / 9780889714847

Reviewed by Marguerite Pigeon

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Physicists view space and time as a single form, undulating and blanket-like. The concept can be hard to grasp. Joseph Dandurand and Isabella Wang are two poets whose new works intuit this oneness, though from different angles. 

Dandurand draws on Indigenous cosmology to track his own advancing years in I Would Like To Say Thank You. The collection locates his experiences within ancestry and in the poet’s specific place in the Kwantlen nation, on the Fraser River.

Dandurand defies divisions in this work, including those imposed by colonial history, and even rigid lines between life and death. In “Statue of a Dream,” he writes: “our people have been on this island for at least ten thousand years and we are still here / and I am here I am from here and my bones will stay here.”

Alternating between moody recitation and lean lyrical lines, Dandurand’s writing has a river-like quality—a liquid poetics in constant motion. From “Of pale-blue shadows”:

I have buried
way too many
family and friends
always asked to carry them
one last time
this is how it is in life
and death and the other side
where all the spirits live
and swim in cool pools
of mountain-fed streams

Yet there is much craft behind Dandurand’s smooth flow. He draws the reader close as he surveys joyful aspects of Kwantlen cultural life, especially its mythology and practices, like early-morning net fishing. Then he intersperses affecting countercurrents from his personal life, including lines touching on painful losses and an unquenched ache for connection—from “Statue of a dream”: “And sixty years in // I still want to be loved. I want to be cuddled.”

Dandurand (The Punishment) also uses this collection to bear witness to the end of Christianity’s hold on his people, as in “Some endless hurt”: 

I am still standing there
as the big book burns
through all the lies and false gods
and we are saved from the church
that sits up the road
that no one goes to anymore
we should burn her down

An angry call of vindication over imposed religious structures—but also exultant, sad, furious, sarcastic, and vengeful. It’s a complex, punk rock tone Dandurand strikes frequently in this collection. The poet conveys, at once, his inner battles and a desire to subvert the reader’s expectations of him, as in the titular poem, “I would like to say thank you…”:

to the men who used me
when I was nine or ten
thank you for scaring me
and giving me nightmares

One might wonder how the poet–narrator, a survivor of crimes, racism, and cruelty, can find this thanks. Dandurand finds a bittersweet answer: 

you cannot have me
you cannot destroy me
I can do that all by myself thank you

This expression, equal parts agential and vulnerable, hits like a slap. But over the whole of I would like to say thank you, a different answer to the question of “thanks” emerges: Dandurand seems grateful to poetry itself, which has allowed him to flow on, regularly touching what is good. 

There’s an irony in this, as Dandurand also maintains a hard-won suspicion of the type of knowledge carried in books—beginning with the bible. From “The pages flip over”: 

and I believe so strongly 
in my spirituality 
that no book could even 
make me think otherwise

Dandurand’s own book refuses printed manipulation. Instead, it brings the reader into intimate contact with an evolving poetic voice.

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Isabella Wang approaches space and time from bodily and poetic angles. In her second collection of poetry, November, November, Wang tracks her experiences across four rainy, eventful Novembers from 2020-2024—years in which she wrote; sought to locate herself in a lasting home and within a poetic lineage; and survived a serious illness. 

The book opens with “Constellations,” a poem Wang has placed in printed rectangles, as if to contain its delicacy and complexity. It evokes a keen awareness of the scales of time and universal structure, from constellations of stars to the architecture of a leaf, to the individual passing of a year, and the afterlife of poets, including those who suffered in Maoist China, the country her parents immigrated from when Wang was a child.

In “Passage 2: November 2021,” Wang centres her admiration for the work of the poet Phillis Webb, who bursts into Wang’s consciousness after she spends time in Webb’s archives at Simon Fraser University. The intensity of Webb’s effect on her takes Wang’s breath away:

               the heart pulses
distances the mind cannot imagine
to cross in a lifetime

why am i crying
grieving a person i’ve never met

Yet Wang (Pebble Swing) allows this unexpected impact to guide her, transforming “Passage 2” into a meditation on the unique temporality of poetic knowledge. 

Wang’s writing can be compressed, with a fragmentary quality that, at times, seems to signal unease, and elsewhere, a need for room to think between words. “Passage 3,” for example, begins with “Untitled,” a poem that explores the mysterious, interlinked life of body and mind:

forgetting’s solidarity
is the body remembering

to tie a knot along the polyvagal rivers
of histories some share

witness the body work
of witnessing—a body of work

Wang’s poetry shifts in Passage 3, becoming more discursive as she confronts a cancer diagnosis, surgery, and the subsequent loss of her housing—events that threaten to permanently shrink her horizon. The reader senses a battle between physical constraints and a mind that craves a larger world, close observation of the movement of time.

But as the poet recovers from illness, Wang works to make sense of renewal, legacy, and place. From “SONNET 2”:

                             if sick was a place i am still finding out
its location      this place that i’m exhausting has exhausted me
to splinters

Wang’s faith, sparked in part by Phillis Webb’s contribution to Canadian poetry, returns to reinvigorate a commitment to poetic community, as in “Passage 4: November 2022”:

we’ve got only the voices of poets
who’ve given a munificence      of their selves
away      speaking of skies in stanzas
comfort but in ways
that are never the same

While Wang honours the gifts of others, like Webb and Ai Qing, November, November carves out a unique place for her writing in the enigmatic universe of poetry.

Marguerite Pigeon writes poetry, fiction, and reviews. Her latest publication, a book-length poem titled The Endless Garment (Wolsak & Wynn), was named to The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 books list for 2021. Originally from Northern Ontario, she lives in Vancouver, where she runs a small editing and writing business, Carrier Communications. [Editor’s note: Marguerite Pigeon’s The Endless Garment is reviewed here by Heidi Greco. Pigeon has reviewed poetry by Grace Kwan, Matt Rader, Joy Kogawa, Chris Banks, Nicholas Bradley, Cecily Nicholson and Arleen Paré in BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), 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.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster