Cecily Nicholson's Book-Length Documentary Poem, From the Poplars

At The Small Press Book Review, rob mclennan reviewed Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson's second book, From the Poplars (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014). A book-length documentary poem that points to an uninhabited island on the North Arm of British Columbia’s Fraser River, it is also a "meditation on an unmarked, twenty-seven and a half acres of land held as government property: a monument to colonial plunder on the waterfront of a city, like many cities, built upon erasures," as Talonbooks notes.

Mclennan put Nicholson's work in context for those of us unfamiliar with this landscape: "There has been a great deal of literary and critical work over the past few years dealing with native land claims and unceded territory all over Vancouver and throughout British Columbia, most recently around the 2010 G20 meetings and subsequent protests." Other writers working in this vein include Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Roger Farr and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, "with much of this and similar kinds of engagements around the Kootenay School of Writers collective."

As for Nicholson's work herein:

For her part, Nicholson writes through and around Poplar Island, working from historical research, observation and an eye towards social justice, exploring what Dorothy Livesay famously called the “documentary poem,” providing a kind of poetic, historical and critical portrait of the island, its people and those who have impacted upon either or both. Her poem, quite literally, begins with documents on and about the space, exploring the genealogical traces of, as Jeff Derksen describes, “the history of use and ownership of a seemingly surplus space,” and provides an intricate collage of details, from lyric to historical correspondence to the cold fact of numbers. As she writes: “stand up now, the wasteland to maintain / your houses they pull down now / stand up now // your houses they pull down / to fright poor men in town // gentry must come down / and the poor shall wear the crown [.]” Hers is not simply an uncritical description or documentary but one that speaks to the removal of various native peoples from their land for the sake of shipyards, and a long poem that does more than simply replicating information, but using that information to help shape a series of collage movements in the form of the long poem.

The full review is at the Small Press Book Review. Also! There's a great conversation with Nicholson and Jules Boykoff about her activism and aesthetic spaces at Jacket2.