The Rock’s Stillness by: Liliane Welch
Trade | 93 pages | ISBN:0-88887-868-0
Year Published:1999 – Borealis | Tidewater Price: $14.95
Forget the time-worn adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, this slim vol.has a cover photo taken by the author of rocks fading into the mist which is arrestingly beautiful. Indeed this small literary jewel, Liliane Welch’s sixteenth book of poetry, presents a perfect gift for the discerning connoisseur.
Welch’s poems, accessible in their simplicity, juxtapose two powerful and enduring themes – art and nature. Welch draws her inspiration both from the great works of art and music of Europe, and from the strength of the mountains that she climbs in summer and upon her return to the New World where she is seduced by the “tides, rains and voyaging winds” beating down on the “quilted mud flats”. Far from being mutually exclusive, this dichotomy of art and nature melds into one as she uses her ascent of the mountain as a metaphor for life, “a radiant altar for climbers”.
Welch takes us on a Grand Tour of Europe – a poetic Butterfield and Robinson. She paints a poetic analysis of Claude Monet’s Water Landscapes and Cezanne’s Nudes in a Landscape. She shows us Renoir’s Kiss – whose lovers are symbolically attached to the rough-hewn marble and in Fable, a riveting picture of seven steel cows installed “On the south slope of the former mines”. Welch is reverential in describing the legacy each artist has left. Her four stanzas of Madame Bovaty in Rouen show us more than any film director could, Emma’s sensual longings. A bored young wife hurtling in her carriage towards passion and her ultimate tragedy hatched “from a nest of lies”. The poet’s images are often of yesteryear. Women “in the safety of sewing circle and church”, “portly middle-aged women who sway through European museums”, the mothers “who look forward and backward” all week to the “cigarettes, the cocktails” those insulators that tranquilize them. She hears echoes of childhood, reads news of absent friends, experiences the “oven summer fires” of Luxembourg, and, back in New Brunswick, the “velvety pollen” of a blizzard “white-out blinding windows”. The theme of art is carried over in Loving the Vertical Dark where we see the autumn colours of New Brunswick as an “annual exhibition. Fall is a “violent palette” and the trees “stretch canvasses over the sugarbush”. These poems of the Tantramar
region are of the highest calibre, as witness a comparison of The Dikes on Fundy Bay with the “austere tired stone parapets” of Europe. Welch uses words as an artist does his material, sometimes placing them at random and ending up with an abstract, and sometimes producing a succinct message. Nowhere is this illustrated more than in the nine visions and daydreams entitled Mosaics:
When earth breaks up
When heaven expands
How will the change
Strike you and me
Within a house
Not made with hands?
But the reader will look in vain for a reflection of contemporary culture. Welch does not march in sync with many other women poets of today. Hers is a dependent voice. The reader is constantly aware of “the other” by her side. “How when I falter, you hold the rope tight; cut a small footbridge over the void”. We feel that like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Welch will “stand henceforth in (his) shadow” but unlike Browning, her voice is not directed at the Beloved but rather, every sensation is a shared experience, a theme of togetherness. That may dismay the reader who looks for the poet’s unique identity and who would like to see her flying on her own, but others will see it as a strength. Indeed the many poems have a strength of their own and many will endure.