Unlearning Ice by: Welch, Liliane
trade | 87 pages | ISBN:0-8887-239-9
Year Published:2001 – Borealis | Tidewater Price: $15.95
Welch, a poet who chooses to walk rather than drive, is a familiar figure downtown. Carrying a backpack, earflaps down to protect against the “faint tatters of the storm”, she has been up since daybreak, writing. This, her seventeenth collection of poems, is witness to a resolute and creative way of life.
A major clue to the source of Welch’s inspiration lies in the cover of Unlearning Ice. Look at it carefully. “Radiant Hush” is the poem that interprets Alex Colville’s painting, Living Room. The radiance describes the aura behind the woman seated at the piano, whilst the shadows wait outside for the seated man. Sinister? Yes. But the poet sees beyond the dark night of the soul, and sheds her own light on this interior. Similarly, “Photo Journeys” is a brilliant poem that puts into words what Thaddeus Holownia captures in his lense. In effect, Welch fulfills the “hunger for language” for which the marshland lies in wait. From Caravaggio in the sixteenth century to the contemporary Guss Grass, Welch is a traveller in the kingdom of art. Taking us with her, her passport is an affinity with the artist.
Unlearning Ice is not only a reflective person’s guide to the “cool, high-walled halls” of Europe’s galleries, but also a metaphysical journey to the often inhospitable topography of the land around the Bay of Fundy. As the deer strip the bark off the trees, so the writer peels away the everyday monotony of winter and lets us experience the “iced quiet” around us. Her message To The Reader at the beginning of the book instructs us wisely to “share the seasonal rhythms of work, love and ritual”. It is a lesson we should heed before we are all drawn into an ever-encroaching morass of mini-malls.