Billboard in the Clouds (review)

Suzanne S. Rancourt's collection of poems Billboard in the Clouds is a valuable addition to the growing body of poetry produced by Native writers of the Northeast—in particular, those with French Canadian Native roots. Rancourt, an Abenaki from Maine, reminds us that New England was Indian territory not so long ago. Because of the holocaust engendered by English settlement, Native peoples of the Northeast have been largely forgotten by mainstream Americans. Large numbers died as the result of disease, many died at the hands of English settlers, and those who survived either hid or fled to Canada. But that was a long time ago, and the collective American consciousness has a short memory.

Rancourt reminds us that Native communities have always lived below the radar in New England. And they have found ways to survive and pass on traditional values, even if those values simply involve a parent teaching a child to garden or fish. Connection to the ancestors is often a private, hidden thing; even to call oneself Abenaki is almost a transgression of years of denial.

The strength of Rancourt's collection is her power of observation and the meaning and beauty she finds in the tiniest detail of the natural world. And she's great at rendering visual, aural, tactile experience in sharp, specific, illuminating images. These clearly imagined details lead her back to bigger questions of identity and connectedness.

In "When the Air is Dry" (13–14) the speaker remembers her grandfather, "Pepere," who would have known when it was time "to work the fields." She remembers her own experience of baling hay, the way "the sun / burns the nape of [her] neck," her tightening muscles, how the "baling twine cuts [her] hands," and the way hay chaff collects in her pants. Although the speaker claims that she cannot smell the "sweet, sweet, fresh cut hay," the reader certainly can. A moment of quiet in the hay field reveals her yearning after an almost remembered past:

a dragonfly'sholographic vision coatsmy past and futurewith the iridescence of unexplained knowing.

(13–14)

Alone in the field, she hears singing as she tries to "grasp a wisdom / children lose / when language is beaten out of them." One gets the impression that it is not just the language but also the connection to the past she is straining to recover. It seems that, if she listens closely and notices every detail, she may be able to see a different, partially recoverable world.

This yearning for an almost remembered past inspires the poem "Take From My Hair—Memories of Change" (43–44) as well. A collective "we" is remembered migrating with the seasons and the crops, specifically, blueberries. But the once-stained, overburdened ash baskets are now clean and empty because the tourists prefer them that way. The times have changed, we learn; "our men [are] bent as willows, / our women strapped with foresight." Again the speaker looks to the past:

i strain to hear my languageamong the leathery leavesamong the trees and trails thatmy grandmothers and grandfathers walked.

(43)

In quiet fields, she says, "i have time to think / and remember what i think / i recall" (43). She describes a blood memory of a collective distant past as well as a childhood memory. But the bear that her ancestors feared meeting in the blueberry patch has been replaced: "a bigger beast / now walks the land" (44).

Images of sky, clouds, wind, breath, and birds in flight permeate the collection. In the poem "Even When the Sky Was Clear" (7–8), the speaker recalls her father talking to the clouds, when she, as a child, "perched amongst and atop [her] White Pine," watches him. She remembers:

Everything still and listening,except for an occasional Crow's caw or Blue Jay, or the tiniest sound of the first few snowflakes landingor the muffled hiss of blanketing fog in its subtle turn to pre-rain mist.

(7)

As an adult she sometimes misses the sounds...