The ‘shock of adrenaline’ and a ‘satchel of guilt’
Perfect Weather
by Jamella Hagen
Sackville: Gaspereau Press, 2026
$24. 95 / 9781554472833
Reviewed by gillian harding-russell
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In Perfect Weather, Jamella Hagen offers her view of living in the Yukon and parts of British Columbia from the perspective of a single mother. The imprint of a strong and independent woman is sensed in these poems while Hagen (Kerosene), who grew up in the Skeena region, writes with candour and self-honesty in chiseled verse and often traditional format.
As we read her poems, we light upon her epiphanies that touch on personal and communal guilt, and, after a failed relationship, a changed understanding of love and tenderness. Here is a collection that celebrates the strength of women who meet the moment of crisis with practicality. With wryness of humour and breadth of understanding, the speaker will not be dragged into expecting sentimental endings.
The title poem, “Perfect Weather,” starts the collection in medias res with a foreshadowing of major themes to follow. Characteristic of thunderstorms but expressed with the freshness of an incongruous image, “summer air” “settled over us, like an electric blanket,” and this natural storm provides an emotive backdrop for an implied severance between the speaker and the “he” of the poem. While “he” “as usual” “refused alcohol / and all manner of luxuries,” the speaker “grew tipsy / on wine coaxed from the grapes” outside the window in Naramata, when signalling a sudden realization of the gravity of the situation, “an overripe / cherry hit the window like a starling”:
A year later, when I left my partner, I turned the word
escalation over and over in my mind:
it sparked electric, it smelled of shame
and spoiled cherries.
When the electrical storm strikes and a fire ignites, the speaker holds the metaphoric “spoiled cherries” to her “breast like a child,” but taking responsibility, covers her child’s mouth and her own “on what appeared / to be the last road out.” The title “Perfect Weather” is replete with irony, indicating both perfect summer weather and the perfect conditions for an electrical storm, which, by extension comes to equate with disaster on a human scale.
Capable women feature in this collection of poems, and so it is no surprise to meet the speaker’s mother, also a proactive single mother and original thinker. In “When My Mother Calls, She Tells Me Stories,” we are offered a glimpse into this woman’s perspective: on coming on a scene where wolves descend on a struggling moose, she calls off the wolves but remarks that the escaping moose looked “so tired” and the wolves “hungry.” Her interference did not help the situation for either party on all levels.
More startling is the story she tells her then young daughter while “chopping celery” about how she, having refused to accompany her brother’s father who “fled the province,” had to make do on her own. When the cow wandered over to a neighbour, and he refused to give it back, she tells her daughter how she went locate the cow in the dark, and shot and butchered it in the field to support her children during the coming winter. “That’s how I fed us / the year your brother was a baby / and you were four, and we lived / in that tiny cabin, just the three of us / sleeping in the same bed.”
Coming full circle, the anecdote in the final stanza is presented from the speaker’s point of view. When she phones her mother to let her know that she, too, has become a single mother, her mother packs her van, and “with her heart full to the roof / with all the practical things [she] needed,” headed up the “Stewart-Cassiar Highway alone.”
Following the same feminist and equal-rights-for-both-genders ethos, the speaker in “The Swimming Pool on the Lawn” does not chastise her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter for taking off her clothes while “the boy and the girl” splash “with matched gusto” in the swimming pool:
…she is the one
to dump the sled and see, at this moment no one
is telling her anything, no put on your clothes, what
a pretty dress, or shouting from the windows of taxis.
Instead, her daughter at this unsullied age is “undistracted,” and can experience “pure delight” with “singular, sharp-eyed intention.” “Rhubarb,” the speaker avers with guarded symbolism, “grows out of the ground each spring // like a bad social habit, full of oxalic acid,” and is curiously associated in her mind with “ballgowns of prime-minister’s wives.” In that image we may conjure all the pretentiousness and formality of being honoured as a wife and accessory to positions of power.
An environmental theme with its undertow of guilt enters “Looking for Bison.” Here personal and communal guilt work in hand in hand, while the speaker looks back on human mistakes, her own included:
…True that some of us
lug a satchel of guilt
for our carnivorous inclination, the garbage
we can’t burn, the way we have treated
one another or allowed ourselves to be treated. Shut up
says one whisper. I hear my own name, very clear over
the sound of two arguing swans.
Nonetheless an idyllic world is not lost in the speaker’s eye while she envisions “an island or mirage” in the middle of a lake where the cottonwoods are “green as palms.” Palm Sunday with its suggestion of Christian forgiveness before a shared and brutal crime (that leaves its mark of guilt even on those whose sin is omission to act) comes to mind.
In a penultimate poem, “If Our Lives,” the speaker reveals a maturity that contrasts with the speaker’s younger self in the opening poem. When a friend makes a “wooden box / for tea” that is “hand sanded” and its “joints mitred / just so,” the speaker discovers a feeling of tenderness for the person who must also have felt that emotion to so carefully have constructed the tea box for her. In the past, she disliked “mornings, machines, stories / with happy endings,” and mistook “chaos for realism” not to mention the “the shock of adrenaline for love.” Today, however, she recognizes the craftsmanship and care in the box’s construction for her and its particular modest use—
There is a thing I want to say
about tenderness. In the full sun
of a spring afternoon, with the ice
still receding all around us, I can
feel it in the wood grain
of this gifted box, its clean lines
and honest lid, the open
hearted space at its centre
for safekeeping.
With its “honest lid” and “open / hearted space at its centre / for safekeeping” the poet suggests the personality of the giver whose affection she implicitly comes to return. In contrast with Pandora’s Box out of which all the miseries and evils of humanity were released, the speaker has been gifted with a box in which to store teas that restore the soul and out of which her immense gratitude and tenderness for the giver arise. Following the parabola of the underlying narrative in Perfect Weather, the speaker undergoes a change of heart and arrives at a purer understanding of love and herself. Here is a fine collection of finely-wrought poems in a fresh and feminist voice that is a pleasure to read.
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A poet, editor, and reviewer, gillian harding-russell has published five poetry collections, and a collection Domestic Disorder (Guernica Editions) is forthcoming in 2028. This summer a chapbook A Handle on Things (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2026) will be published. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Chapbook Award three times, and in 2015, the sequence “Proud Men Do Not Listen” tied for first place and in 2016, the chapbook Making Sense won first place. Her work has been published in twenty-two anthologies. Poems are forthcoming in The Antigonish Review, The Malahat and Queens Quarterly. [Editor’s note: gillian has written about recent collections by Russell Thornton, Steffi Tad-y, Pamela Porter Svetlana Ischenko, Donna Kane, Diana Hayes, Susan McCaslin, Marlene Grand Maître, and Ian Thomas 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 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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