Cara Waterfall Reviews:

Derek Webster, National Animal, Véhicule Press, 2024
Ben Robinson, As Is, ARP Books, 2024
Holly Flauto, Permission to Settle, Anvil Press, 2024

Questions of identity, belonging and settlement in contemporary Canada have become more prominent in recent years. Poets Derek Webster, Ben Robinson and Holly Flauto explore the inherent multiplicity of Canadian identity but have different approaches to the lush terrain of Canadian consciousness and how they define cartographies of self and nation. 

In National Animal, Derek Webster addresses Canada’s fraught historical legacy as his collection oscillates between free verse and more formal poetic forms, like terza rima and the sonnet, to engage with the complexity of national identity, environmental collapse and memory.

The choice of section titles (‘Imperial Silence,’ ‘Miss Canada,’ ‘Aluminum Sadness,’ ‘The Thinker’) suggests a progression from colonial history to contemporary Canadian consciousness. Poems like ‘King Canute’ and ‘Dominion’ examine Canada’s colonial heritage, while place-specific poems like ‘Oakville Revisited,’ ‘Fletcher’s Field’ and ‘Tannery Hill’ engage with mapping one’s identity on a smaller scale.

The titular poem in which Canada’s national animal is ‘adrift in this foreign home’ suggests a profound sense of displacement, reflecting the immigrant experience, while ‘chew[ing] up the book/of what it was’ only to find that the story ‘keeps going’ reinforces how we shape identity through personal and collective memory. 

Webster painstakingly crafts precise sound patterns through consonance and assonance. The final stanza has as many layers as the Canadian identity itself: ‘This is Jerusalem the crowned lady/on the wall smiles. Winter/or summer, it trembles, gnawing/on itself, surviving on its wiles.’

The reference to Jerusalem and the crowned lady suggests the burden of colonial and religious legacies, emphasizing the tension between established symbols of power and the unsettled nature of Canadian identity. The reader can feel the beaver’s stress in all seasons, evoking the disequilibrium of grappling with landscapes of survival, adaptation and belonging.

Webster is particularly attuned to what lurks beneath Canada’s genteel facade, which is at odds with the nation’s tumultuous history, particularly with regard to the mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. ‘Dominion’ is one of National Animal’s centrepieces, offering a complex meditation on Canada’s crises, from its colonial legacy to environmental collapse and national identity. Indigenous and colonial cultures collide: ‘They come/wrapped in rabbit hoods/with spears./Others/come wrapped/in sheep’s wool/and Christian fervor.’ The poem’s ironic questions about Elders critique superficial attempts at reconciliation, while the Abenaki trail symbolizes the erasure of Indigenous presence.

Canada’s uncomfortable relationship with its national identity is reiterated in the imagery of foreign but familiar faces:

When the ice melts, Canada & I  
re-emerge, arms locked like wrestlers 
in frozen embrace. The Mail and Empire:

TWO BODIES FOUND IN ALLEY 

“Their faces are so familiar” 
 says a bystander. “Yet I can’t say 
I truly recognize either.”

Apocalyptic imagery proliferates in poems that present a complex view of human beings’ relationship with nature. In ‘Portrait with Stuffed Jackalope,’ the narrator expresses the loss of environmental optimism: ‘You used to say It’s not too late before praying/mantises climbed the sugar-water dispenser/and garrotted the hummingbirds.’ And in ‘Dominion,’ melting ice and a fawn’s skeleton corroborate environmental degradation, while the sinking canoe reinforces his assertion that Canada is unable to address its fundamental problems.

Webster’s poems powerfully illustrate humanity’s self-destructive nature through political erasure and persistence, the horrors of war and social indifference. In ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ with its triadic stanzas and controlled tetrameters, attempts to erase political graffiti become futile as ‘toxins leach from the wall’ while erased words promise to return, indicating the cyclical nature of political suppression.

‘Dresden’ presents devastating imagery of bombing civilians, where ‘the tonnage whistles in darkness dropping/upon a million civilians and refugees,’ showing how humans inflict unimaginable suffering on each other. And in ‘Apartment Block,’ he demonstrates how systems designed to help people often abandon them: ‘This building is a business/not a charity’ as veterans die in duct-taped chairs and evicted tenants’ belongings mingle with ‘the bones of small animals/that also failed to thrive here.’ 

The use of temporal distance and the direct challenge to readers in ‘An Old Painting of Charleston Harbor’ implicates Canada in its denial and complicity in avoiding its racist past (‘it is difficult to discern/whether that is dark coat/or bare arm’). Through its ekphrastic form, the poem reveals how societies reframe history to appear more ‘picturesque’ while maintaining its ambiguity.

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Auroras of Autumn,’ ‘The Thinker’ explores cosmic insignificance through binary oppositions. In the section titled ‘Objects/Distance,’ Webster confronts our place in the universe as ‘glorified specks of dust and ice,’ while asserting the importance of human consciousness and connection (‘we/mean nothing, but we is all we have’). In the poem’s final section,‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,’ Webster closes with the central theme of National Animal: our capacity for self-destruction.

In Ben Robinson’s As Is, intertextuality also serves as a powerful tool, weaving together personal narrative and historical documentation, including public execution documents and prehistorical elements, to examine the colonial history of Hamilton, ON. In the book’s opening lines, the Hamilton resident uses a treaty to illustrate the interplay between colonial documentation and Indigenous presence. The boundary is both history and metaphor, setting up his examination of how historical complexities echo in contemporary life. 

THE ORIGINAL TREATY between the Mississaugas 
and the British, described the upper boundary of 
the parcel as an imaginary line from Lake Ontario 
northwest to Deshkan Ziibi / La Tranche / The 
Thames. To confirm it, Jones & co. set out on 
foot from the lake, crossing the Speed and the 
Grand before reaching the Conestoga. Realizing 
their line would never meet the specified river, 
thus could not close the perimeter, they turned 
home to inform the Crown that the Indenture 
entitled it to an impossible tract.

Mapping and measurement resurface in ‘Chain Bearer’ to show how colonial surveying shaped the landscape, with Augustus Jones’s measurements still defining modern Hamilton’s streets and boundaries:

…laying out Main Street 
with a hundred link chain

pulled taut every sixty-six feet —
 
…This afternoon, the Roads Department 
echoes his drifting line along

five lanes of asphalt for commuters 
to trace with their wheels come morning.

‘Remediation’ and ‘Low Vacancy’ highlight the erasure of Indigenous presence and how colonial power manifests through the act of naming, from the harbourmaster’s reef (‘when a white man/runs his boat into something, it gets named after him’) to the institutions in ‘Low Vacancy,’ where after ‘the city knocked the stadium down and rebuilt/it on the same site, they renamed it after a coffee shop/named for a Canadian hockey player who is now dead.’ He also illustrates the hidden brutality of such landmarks in ‘Why Not Give In and Call it Lovely?’: ‘in 1814, a sidewalk plaque announces,/eight men were sentenced to hang/for treason against a country/that did not yet exist.’

Colonial power persists through bureaucracy, from deeds to birth certificates, showing how official papers ‘fix’ identity and belonging. The poem ‘James’ reveals: ‘All that fixes you to the world today/is a government-issued sheet of paper/where I print your name with a blue ballpoint pen.’

Robinson emphasizes the palimpsest of history by using techniques like fragmented typography and historical references to show how colonial history is layered throughout the landscape, from ancient lake beds to highways. This layered approach provides counter-narratives that help him delve into the labyrinthine nature of settlement and belonging.

Holly Flauto’s Permission to Settle offers a more intimate exploration of how personal histories contribute to one’s sense of belonging, using immigration forms to explore identity and belonging while simultaneously subverting them. In ‘Establishing Acknowledgement,’ the speaker recognizes the paradox in requesting permission from other settlers to live on Indigenous land, employing anaphora to build meaning:

…I would like to acknowledge that 
                 I am asking the wrong people 
…I would like to acknowledge that 
                I walk onto this stolen land while 
                I assert in a million white checkboxes 
                to the settlers
                that I should live here

Flauto transforms bureaucratic forms into poetry, with responses that overflow the constraints of official documentation, particularly with regard to work permits: ‘my immigration status this year a wrist twisted and broken/by fear of existing without proper documentation.’

Of Italian origin and American citizenship, Flauto weaves together English, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese, reflecting the multilingual reality of contemporary Canadian identity and expressing their own fractured identity: ‘I am one quarter Italiana and no quarters Italiana speaking/…yo hablo Español like a 13-year-old/…I know a smattering more Français gleaned/from my son’s French-Immersion homework.’

And in a poignant playground scene, Flauto confronts her dual identity, capturing her complex relationship with both nations: ‘my americanness sliding into/the bases of my playground/Canadasburg address’ — while acknowledging her connection to Texas — ‘where my dad lies still.’

Flauto has the ability to transform personal experience into universal reflection, where questions of Indigenous rights, immigration and cultural integration remain at the forefront of national consciousness. In ‘Residential address,’ Flauto takes us through their many homes in theatrical sequences with the last three acts occurring in Vancouver in various guises and seasons, revealing that the places we live in also change and evolve over time, like our identities.

Through their distinctive poetic voices, Webster, Robinson and Flauto weave new designs of belonging and identity but also unravel established patterns, demonstrating how Canadian identity continues to defy simple definition. Only by confronting Canada’s colonial past can we move forward; as Webster says so eloquently: ‘Dominion help us/love you/for new reasons.’

—Cara Waterfall