Snow Formations

Weary of her humdrum existence, a woman packs up and heads for Arctic Quebec, where she hopes to find a new lease on life teaching native children. She quickly discovers, however, that the Inuit have far more to teach her than she, them, as she slowly learns that each day on this earth is a rich sensory experience, not merely to be lived, but savoured. Loosely based on the author?s own three-year experience in settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast, Snow Formations takes a realistic look at the modern Inuit world through post-industrial eyes, always walking the fine line between idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. Steeped in contradiction, this is Canada?s North with all its trappings: igloos and pool halls, raw meat and radio, dogsleds and diapers. The North may be great and white, but it is not always pretty. Snow Formations began as a thirteen-minute commission for the CBC Radio series “Home and Away,” featuring new work by five Canadian poets writing from a cross-cultural perspective.

AUTHOR

Carolyn Marie Souaid

Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the “theatre” of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.

Endre Farkas was born in Hungary and is a child of Holocaust survivors. He and his parents escaped during the 1956 uprising and settled in Montreal. His work has always had a political consciousness and has always pushed the boundaries of poetry. Since the 1970s, he has collaborated with dancers, musicians and actors to move the poem from page to stage. Still at the forefront of the Quebec English language literary scene-writing, editing, publishing and performing-Farkas is the author of eleven books, including Quotidian Fever: New and Selected Poems (1974-2007). He is the two-time regional winner of the CBC Poetry “Face Off” Competition. His play, Haunted House, based on the life and work of the poet A.M. Klein, was produced in Montreal 2009. Farkas has given readings throughout Canada, USA, Europe and Latin America. His poems have been translated into French and Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian and Turkish.

Reviews

“ Both the mood and method of St. Lambert, Quebec poet Carolyn Marie Souaid’s Snow Formations, her third collection, are entirely different. Based on her experiences teaching in northern Quebec, it features pared-down, imagistic intensity and an ironic tone. The first section, pre-departure, conveys her boredom and lack of fulfillment. Then comes her flight north: “my fissured, brown/liver-spotted towns/vaporized in the dark air/and then I woke, the world had accumulated again/ outside my window/ the strapping, white, freshness of it/ shoveling life/back into my eyes.” Of course, this is a familiar ritual (reject civilization, reclaim the senses in an encounter with the Natives and Nature). But Souaid is no sentimentalist; wary of easy answers, she’s as cautionary as she is celebratory about the North and Inuit life. The images are particularly vivid—and unsettling—when she writes of the natural world. “Cabin Fever” evokes a feeling of menace as winter closes in (“the grey void of water, /the one wrong slip to certain death..the cold shoulder/ of snow against the door, the house”). Elsewhere, she writes of the solstice: “Earth suddenly sped up a notch while/ Hades breathed deeply from the night between the rocks.” In one poem, Souaid invites the reader to “feed on the world,/one breath at a time.” That invitation is made compelling by these vivid, brooding poems.” —The Toronto Star