‘This one chance to love’

All of Us Hidden
by Joanna Streetly

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press: 2025
$20.00 / 9781773861722

Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith

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Joanna Streetly’s verse shows a strong understanding of poetic craft. Her tales are personal, observant, moving, and expansive—made potent through a distinctive working of language and image. In lyric and careful free verse form, she draws the reader in, intimately, with a deft mingle of emotion, circumstance, and the natural world.

The first of five sections is titled Dear Island. It is a story of romance and tragedy, drawing on love found and the loss of two young lives, in a new and elemental landscape the poet inhabits, and that inhabits her. The life and death circumstances themselves are already potent and tragic, but Streetly’s rendering handles these with care, working knowing poetics, avoiding cliché, and rendering poignancy without reduction or self-serving riffs. In “Gyre,” reflecting on a kelp bed, Streety invokes a metaphor: “minnows that leap […] & land […] on blades of kelp […] in their silver straightjackets jerk & gasp.” And concludes the poem with: “knowing I do have stepsons. I do. Nothing is the past. / They are here in my ribcage. Knocking.”

This sorrowful aspect is embedded in a new and evolving relationship with a man, vaguely referenced, but presented as an intrinsic resident of this land—an idyllic, albeit demanding landscape. The romance brings bliss, depths, and challenges, and the telling forms an engaging poetic weave. In “Winter Fires,” a series of seven triplets, the poet ends with “In the history of lovers I’m hardly the first / to fire the question: / After it takes you, what then?” A question that broadens beyond the poem.

And that island, where, even after heartbreak and tragedy, the speaker longs to return to—perhaps just to its first primitive discoveries, its innocent phase—that place evoking memories, made vivid for the reader through Streetly’s potent image-rendering language: “[…] a pinballer’s fancy of reefs / detonated by rolling ranks of swell / celery heads of sea palms torn from the frontlines / tossed aground with stinking mussel shells / a no-man’s land […]”

The second section—All of Us Hidden—gives the book its name. It’s a short section, laden with vulnerability, sadness, and opaque trauma. There is flesh, nature, water, and sadness—swimming in “the muck of love,” with and through breath, and reaching: 

bright scales falling, falling, even
as I reach for them & they sink
one at a time, barely a splash
gold coins to the deep, and no map

The middle section is Living My Mother. Streetly explores family, childhood (mis)adventures, motherhood, and mother-loss. Always, nature is potent and present; she evokes its elements as  pathetic fallacy and metaphor: “My mother is dead. I weep in a field, in February rain & hail. The muddy hole.”

Is her book to be framed as eco-poetry, nature poetry? The line between is fine. I would say it is poetry born in environments where Streetly’s existence in relatively remote, non-urban dwelling places, where ‘nature’s’ proximity, is worn as her outer layer of skin. She writes from and in there. And do we need labels, anyway?

Her settings and companions come as no surprise, knowing that Streetly (Wild Fierce Life), who has received several writing awards, has lived close to nature for over thirty years, in Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, which embraces the coastal towns Tofino and Ucluelet and a tract of inland territory, and she was the 2018 to 2020 Tofino Poet Laureate. 

Her ‘fellow’ inhabitants turn up constantly: birds—sparrows, mergansers, redwing blackbirds, so many birds; water—waterfalls, meltwater, creeks, ice, glaciers; forces—fire, clouds, rocks, wind, stars, the moon; trees—hemlock, cedars; sea-things—mussels and whalebone; insects and flora—caterpillars, ferns; and so much more. All these elements are intertwined in her life and writing, echoing and vivid in her zests and sorrows. In “Worlds Between” she writes: “I am all the small birds in the / vacant lot now wilded by bushes bearing thorns.”

The final section, Too Fast, draws on and pulls toward Streetly’s currents and companions. She discovers “life not being ownable,” but offering “this one chance to love.” She speaks here not simply of coupled love, but of the heart, the senses—raw and observant—open to and embracing all things, all experiences existence presents to her.

Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling with words and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, swayed by experimenters in early Toronto days, juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven volume poetic series fluttertongue. His decades-long westward migration through Canada’s landscapes implanted continuing amazement and many poetic influences. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, from Radiant Press, 2022. Most recently, The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall appeared in 2024. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. He is currently absorbed in a rappy-spoken-word album project, as SloLo Smithy, streaming on BandCamp.

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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