Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry by Lorri Neilsen Glenn (review)

When a poet writes prose, especially when he or she reflects on the art of verse, the result may be so transcendent that it rightly takes its place on the library shelves as an independent distinction. Usually, however, the poet’s prosaic musing proves valuable for what it reveals about his or her consciousness, the psyche that issues the poetry. One should read Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry for this reason, to gain greater insight into the academic ethnographer who, as a mature woman, following her parents’ deaths, took up verse. (Her birth-date is a question, but the internal evidence of the reminiscences assembled in these semi-nostalgic essays that espouse a kind of coffee-brewing or flower-planting poetics suggests a sexagenarian author.) Indeed, her first verse collection appeared in 2003, a second in 2007, and a third in 2010. Glenn’s poetry has won prizes and nominations, and, in 2005, after having published just one book, the Prairie-raised scholar was appointed poet laureate of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a post she held until 2009.

The nine essays in Threading Light meditate on life, death, memory, landscapes, art, love, poetry, community, and family. Glenn revisits childhood and early adulthood, graduate school and child rearing, Prairie train tracks and east coast surf, libraries and cemeteries, Hong Kong and Regina, Halifax and Vancouver. Along the way, she is pro-woman’s liberation and anti-war, orgasmic in writing a grad-school exam and rueful about aging (and the ageism that complements sexism). Her principal, guiding muses are the French Jewish philosophe Simone Weil, British novelist Virginia Woolf, and Canadian poet Bronwen Wallace. These three women – in particular – support Glenn’s pacifism, her desire for ‘communitas,’ and her adoration of ‘stubborn particulars,’ what US poet Ezra Pound termed ‘luminous details.’ Thus, these essays – reflections on a life – are immediately readable, providing glimpses of pain (a fiancé’s suicide) and pleasure (a poem, a recipe, a painting) and yielding a philosophy that is fundamentally decent: ‘When I cultivate empathy – and that is the continual challenge – there isn’t much room in there for ego.’ Although Glenn treats us to nine separate pieces, the themes (or ‘threads’) interweave: the book is a patchwork quilt, yes, but the patches resemble each other.

One applauds Glenn’s bons mots: ‘Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience’; ‘The fibre of holocaust after holocaust is threaded into our history as humans …’; ‘The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears.’ The prose is poised – pleasant, never nasty or trenchant. Glenn reveals herself to be humble, humane. She even casts herself as a ‘white liberal grieving for other’s lot in life ….’ But it’s not quite true. ‘Race’ troubles these easy-going pieces: Glenn eventually acknowledges her ‘aboriginal roots,’ but the recognition appears accidentally in an early essay, wherein the ‘white’ girl befriends a Native man and eschews the racism of her white peers and elders. Perhaps Glenn’s most powerful poetry will emerge when she explores her own suppressed, Métis heritage.