‘Surviving like it was nothing’

Real Grownup
by Elizabeth Bachinsky

Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026
$19.95 / 9780889714960

Reviewed by Carellin Brooks

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What does it mean to be a real grown-up, we wonder in our younger days, from our vantage point of youth and with so much still to learn? Elizabeth Bachinsky’s titular poem in this collection offers some clues: 

Go to work.
Have a clean house.
Eat healthy food…
Hose off the children in the backyard.
Have a backyard.

Alas, when we finally arrive at that fabled middle age, we realize things aren’t quite as easy as those faraway, almost mythical grown-ups from our youth made them look. That backyard is out of reach, the children may or may not have happened, and we’re still trying to figure out meal prep. 

Bachinsky’s new book of poetry is shot through with tenderness not only for the befuddlement of middle age but for the foolishness of youth. Seen in the rearview mirror, her own adventures in being bad are understandable, even lovable. “And as I was sweet and willing, famous among the boys,” she writes in “Fern Hill,” after Dylan Thomas’ poem of the same name published eight decades ago. 

Both Thomas’ poem and Bachinsky’s concern time: the heedlessness of the young who believe it will last forever, and the sweet sorrow of the poet looking back, who can see how brief a span it really was. 

The funniest piece in this book is the prose poem addressed to her younger self, “Love You.” The teenage Bachinsky’s boyfriend happens to possess a truly magnificent organ: 

I just didn’t know what I had. Later, I would know that I had squandered — yes, squandered! — this fantastic appendage, this paragon of penises, so utterly, so absolutely….
….Reader, I don’t want to go on here and make you uncomfortable or anything, but I measured it. His thing was as thick around as my wrist and as long as my forearm.

In the same prose poem, Bachinsky addresses a letter to her teenage self: 

Dear Elizabeth,
Jesus. Don’t break it off with Billy. Take it easy… You don’t have to love him, hon. But you sure can love that dick.

Funny, sexy, bawdy writing like this is all too rare in Canadian poetry. Bachinsky’s work is a breath of fresh air, sure, but more importantly, her willingness to discuss such topics in no way diminishes the seriousness of her overall project. 

Among the numbered in this book are Bachinsky’s losses. Young moms who tried, like her, to get sober, but unlike her, failed and died. “Now that he’s dead, I can tell you about him,” Bachinsky writes of another former boyfriend in “Green Death,” a line she repeats, with variations, about other lost friends and exes, “This was more than a decade ago, before my daughter was born, which is why I can write about him now.” That’s from “Maudlin,” about a longtime friend’s suicide. 

Death and birth, a life span. The cover of her book, by Elizabeth Dwan, pictures matryoshka, those imperial Russian folk art nesting dolls that fit one inside the other, in bubbling blue water, uncoupled and tumbling, their painted smiles unchanging, their big blue eyes open wide, lashes splayed above. One doll only remains unbroken and intact: the smallest one, spinning away from the others above the waves. The expression on its face is too far away to see but it looks more contemplative than its fellows: the eyes narrower, the lips set in a line. Has the daughter of the long, tumbled line of matryoshka escaped their fate? 

Vancouver-based Bachinsky (The Hottest Summer in Recorded History) writes of motherhood as well as her own youth, but the most striking metaphor among these poems may be the last one of the book. The poet’s co-op has undertaken extensive renovations, and her patio plants are moved to the roof. Two years later, only the hens and chicks, those tough succulents, have survived: 

once supple and spongy, now hard as rock and spiky as cacti, tough tough tough, and very much alive, bursting from the confines of her planter box, mouthy and defiant as a teenaged girl in love… I’m pretty sure this is the plant my mother gave me from her garden in Peachland. The same hen and chicks she brought from Prince George forty years ago… surviving like it was nothing. Like this was how she was really meant to live. 

What is it like to be a real grown-up, especially a real grown-up woman, a daughter, the mother of another daughter? Is it to be the matryoshka, using one’s own body as a shield for the smaller ones only to end up broken and discarded? Or the hen amongst the chicks, finding the will to survive when forgotten, to thrive even, to become one’s tougher, spikier self? 

Bachinsky provides possibilities, not answers. We know the trappings of earlier generations, the house with a car in the garage, may not become ours; we might not even want them. We know we will raise our daughters differently from the ways our mothers raised, or didn’t raise, us. Do we know where we’re going, though? In “Matryoshka’s Singularity,” a repeating poem of six stanzas, the poet describes how she “turned my inside out when I had” her daughter, and finishes

straight back to my mother’s arms. Her, inside out.
I turned my inside in. When I made you,
I whispered, That’s the way, and off you went. 
My girl, you echoed out, you echoed in. 

Echoes of the poet’s life, the people she knew and knows, but most of all her lineage, going both backwards and forwards, suffuse this book. This is a poet in full command of her powers, taking the measure, or as she beseeches Time in the last line of “Fern Hill,” “Let me go, let me float, let me see.” We readers are lucky to have the benefit of this seeing: her clear vision, her eye spinning through the world. 

[Editor’s note: Along with three other authors (Aaron Cully Drake, Renée Saklikar, and Russell Thornton), Elizabeth Bachinsky will participate in the ‘Harbour & Nightwood Multi-Book Launch‘ at the Irish Heather in Vancouver on Wednesday, April 22. Doors open at 6:30.]

Carellin Brooks is the author of Learned (Book*hug, 2022), poetry, and four other books. She lives in Vancouver, where she works at the University of British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam First Nation. [Editor’s note: Brooks’ book of poetry, Learned, was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. She has reviewed recent books by Zena Sharman, Wendy Donawa, 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 (nonfiction), 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.

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