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Tributaries: patti sinclair + The Late Season
InThe Late Season (At Bay Press) poet patti sinclair offers a profound meditation on loss, memory, and the quiet revelations of the natural world. Written in the wake of a family death, this narrative long poem explores how grief unsettles and reshapes us. For Tributaries, patti shares how solitude, nature, and the rhythms of mourning converged to shape her moving and immersive debut.
An interview with patti sinclair
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be?
patti sinclair: The Late Season is a narrative long poem, diving into how death re-stories our lives. The ground abruptly shifts, due to the extraordinary tide of death, and the dizzying stun of bereavement; the season of death’s initiation. Painful at the same time as ordinary, in what remains in the stirrings of death, is an immersion in the waves of the natural world, in tandem with grief. I was living by the ocean, in the country, far away from home where a family member died. I became more intimate with my closer neighbours: the bodies of water, sand, sun, and stone. I drifted, listened, and wrote.
ALU: If your collection had a theme song, what would it be?
ps: The River Song/Chant:
The river is flowing, flowing and growing,
the river is flowing down to the sea.
Mother carry me, your child I’ll always be.
Mother carry me back to the sea.
– Diana Hildebrand-Hull
from Songs of the Sacred Wheel
Earth Dance Singers
ALU: What’s a non-written piece of art that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?
ps: Jonathan Elias, The Prayer Cycle album.
A friend-a wordsmith & musician himself-gave me a copy of composer, Jonathan Elias’ The Prayer Cycle; an album of classical/choral/world music. It was initially presented to me, simply, as 9 Movements. It is the composition of music and sounding—before I knew there was anything “written,” which I, English-centric, could understand. It is written in twelve languages: Hungarian, Mali, Swahili, Dwala, Tibetan, German, French, Urdu, Latin, English, Italian, Hebrew, and Spanish. Beyond the one line I deciphered in the one English-lyric Movement, this choral symphony initially spoke to me beyond any words, but spoke in understanding, like the natural world. Every-body dies. I am not a religious person, but the tides of The Prayer Cycle can carry one through times of prodigious transition. My hope is that The Late Season can too, companion the reader.
patti recommends…
“A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country” from
Marilyn Dumont’s South Side of a Kinless River (Brick Books)
ALU: Why did you choose Marilyn Dumont’s poem, “A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country?” What do you enjoy most about this particular poem?
ps: Marilyn Dumont is one of my favourite poets. Choosing from her newest collection, Southside of a Kinless River (Brick Books, 2024) in the poem, “A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country” Dumont explores Indigenous women’s creative power and their extraordinary midwifery skills which many settler women and awāsisak (children) experienced, juxtaposed with western history attempts at degradation and dismissal of Indigenous women who were active in the new society that was being formed in Canada.
I am attracted to this poem for the languaging and imagery of birth, water, and ascendancy, “Water-webbed/suckled minnows threading / through swoop-fluid diving / brown hands massaging.” It also led to further study in past stories of Indigenous Midwives, having had experiences with midwifery myself.
“A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country” holds reverence for the past unrecognized skill and care of Indigenous Midwives at the same time as it echoes, of labours to come, in the settling of the West; how Indigenous women/midwives were also
“…massaging
the belly of the motherland […]
for the coming labour.”
A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country
Brown bent women
singing water circles
rain-suckling
minnow-threading
babies licked to sleep swinging
threading
through wēwēpison
awāsisak
flannel-wrapped cradle
suspended between long ropes
strung corner to corner
within easy reach of a tired brown hand
lulling awāsis to sleep
Dark women circle
brooding litters
women with strong minds
and swings across their beds
suckle minnows to sleep
through water veins
Water-webbed suckled minnows threading
through swoop-fluid diving
brown hands massaging
belly of the motherland
steeping wild raspberry tea
for the coming labour
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patti sinclair gratefully creates on the land of the People of the Papaschase First Nation. Author of one memoir and five poetry chapbooks, most recently, The Rightful Skin, with Rose Garden Press, a featured poem, “The Brine,” forthcoming with Capital City Press and poetry in We’Moon: The Growing Edge, patti’s poetry attempts to ground fierce and beautiful impulses found in private moments and collective rituals. She relishes sharing her works out-loud, having performed in poetry, music, and art festivals. Her forthcoming book of poetry, The Late Season will be released by At Bay Press in the From the Heart Series.
* * *
Thanks to patti for answering our questions, and to At Bay Press for the text from The Late Season, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Brick Books for the text of “A nation of Indigenous midwives delivered this country” from Marilyn Dumont’s South Side of a Kinless River.
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