Review: Judy Gaudet's Conversation with Crows

          Judy Gaudet captures nature’s ability to create community in her second book of poetry Conversation with Crows. Gaudet paints her native Prince Edward Island through metaphor and imagery, producing a collection of poems which makes readers aware of nature’s capacity to teach.
          In his essay “Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry,” Don McKay states “it is as dangerous to act as though we were not a part of nature as it is to act as though we were not a part of culture,” an idea picked up by Gaudet through the questions the crows ask in the opening, eponymous poem:

“But wait!
Isn’t she the one
we had the message for,
something important
we had to tell?” (7).

          The combination of village communities, images of crows, and the iconic red dirt makes this a recognizably PEI production. Like a crow, Gaudet picks up, explores, and then moves on to the next shiny thing as the books progresses; for example, the crow image mutates into discussions of owls and sparrows. She also harvests “the produce of a living community” by preferring a vocabulary accessible to anyone who picks up her book (74). Following William Wordsworth’s pronouncement that true poetry uses the “language of men”, Gaudet’s straightforward diction treats topics both deep and every day. However, in places the poems' very simplicity leaves readers wishing the message was clearer.
        Where Gaudet uses binaries to create powerful, emotional meanings, her creativity reaches new heights. For example, “Equinox” contrasts the “dark shapes of the tree” to the spaces between them that “shines white with snow” (12). Similarly, “Early Waking” pairs “[l]ife and death” and “fear and love” as necessary experiences for people to use to leave their “reports” on the ground they walk (12, 22). According to Gaudet, just as nature’s seasons change, life fluctuates from positive to negative and back again.
          Judy Gaudet’s individual poems cycle through meanings found in island life, nature, and memory. But as a whole, Conversation with Crows brings all people to accord with nature by celebrating “beauty, our vulnerability/unity” (44).


 

Works Cited

Gaudet, Judy. Conversation with Crows. Toronto: Oberon Press, 2014. Print.

McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry.” Vis a Vis. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 1993. 30-1. Print.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds.   Abrams et al. New York: WW Norton & Co., 2000. 239-251. Print.


--by Monica Grasse, with help from Ben Lord, Sharisse LeBrun and Molly Strickland.