The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring. The poems weave women’s igloo art, a community’s grief for teenage suicides, the immensity of landscape, and the tension between the Elder’s intuition and the outsiders’ science. Shifting between mythic tale-telling and the vibrancy of town life, these poems will speak to those for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible.
“In the Introduction to this deeply felt and deeply perceptive book, Rosemary Clewes writes: “It is for these people—for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible that I tell my story to you in poems.” Her sentence touches on the three central elements of The Woman Who Went to the Moon: the story of her visit to a place, the people who inhabit that place, and the luminous poetry that conveys the experience. Like the “woman shaman” she invokes, Clewes summons up with deft verbal magic the land and culture of the Innu, pulling her reader into the splendors and the sorrows of the Great Dark with poetic lines as incisive as the “pencilled light” of moonbeam that frames the fishing hut of “Close Up.”
—John Reibetanz
“From an experienced Arctic traveller and accomplished poet these are love poems—tender, sensual, ecstatic—to the land and the people of Canada’s North, a world plunged in winter into a profound darkness alleviated only by the diurnal moon. These are also exquisite poems of sorrow in the face of all that threatens Canada’s North—its inhabitants and its environment. A must read for all those who care.”
—Ruth Roach Pierson
inannaadmin –
The Woman Who Went to the Moon by Rosemary Clewes
reviewed by Candice James
Canadian Poetry Review – July 3, 2017
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This collection of poetry is a combination of memoir and insight into an outsider’s short stint spent in the Arctic village of Igloolik. Clewes successfully weaves folk-lore tales and current community life into a blanket that warms the chill of the immense northern landscape.
In “Dark Descending” these words beautifully paint the essence of Igloolik: ‘the white frozen sum of the world / sinks inside twilight’s blue pelt.” And in the poem “Igloolik” the poet’s paintbrush continues to bring the north alive with vibrant creativity; “if you stay in the town / that lies in the crook/ of the bay’s shady elbow / it’ll be a few days / before the sun bowls any heat down these streets.”
The poet pulls us along on her northern word sleigh as she delves into how important it is in the Arctic outback to have and hear the “elders” events witnessed retold as expressed in these lines excerpted from the poem “Witness”: ‘the weave of worlds yoked / to the silence of his mind’. And then, in a 180 degree turn, Clewes immerses us in a horrific old Eskimo tale passed down through generations; the word of mouth reiteration of events their forebears have seen and heard in years gone by. There is a gory bloodletting of old myth onto the snowy page in “The Sun and the Moon” where the Sun is the sister and the Moon is her brother: ‘She took her knife, sharpened it, cut off one of her breasts and tossed it to her brother, saying ‘Since you seem to be so fond of me, eat me then!”
In the poem “Ruth” gorgeous images of Igloolik abound in graceful and poetic dance: “you dip your brush in water paint / snow’s cursive as light bathed in blue time – / crystals freezing on the page. // when your brush loses / its way you return to the horizon / where the season’s / Inuksuk shoulders the day.’
The poetic painting of life in Igloolik is vividly expressed in “Iglu” with word images of magazine pages glued to the walls, skins on the floor to sit on, sealskins wrapped around human shoulders and the warmth evidenced in the following lines: ‘Let the winter house speak to the walls / leaving no trace of the joins mortared by / moonlight’s blue flame.’
With the weave of the wand, her pen, Rosemary Clewes serves up a literary feast of poetic magic as she takes us on a magical, mystical sleigh ride through the pristine, white land of the ‘long moon’ and the culture of ‘Igloolik’. After leaving this feast for the mind, the reader’s soul will truly be sated!
About the Poet: Rosemary Clewes is a poet, nonfiction writer, photographer and artist. After many rich years as a social worker, a horsewoman, pianist, painter and printmaker, she settled for writing and poetry. Her extensive northern travel, forming a body of work in both poetry and prose, includes Once Houses Could Fly: Kayaking North of 79 Degrees (2012), and Thule Explorer: Kayaking North of 77 Degrees (2008). A crown of sonnets, also entitled “Thule Explorer” was nominated by The Malahat Review for the National Magazine Awards in 2006. In 2006, she was also a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards for the suite entitled, “Where Lemon Trees Bloom In Winter: Sojourn in Sicily.” A chapbook entitled Islands North and South is forthcoming. She has been published most recently in Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Grain Magazine and The Fiddlehead. Living on the cusp of her personal frontiers is a recurring theme, and in prose and poetry she conducts a conversation with the land, seeking to understand her place in the larger order, and in the power and fragility of nature. She has rafted and kayaked some of the great rivers and fjords in western Canada and the Eastern Arctic. She lives in Toronto.
About the Reviewer: Candice James is a poet, musician, visual artist, singer songwriter. She was Poet Laureate of New Westminster, BC for two 3 year terms 2010-2016. and awarded the title of Poet Laureate Emerita in November 2016 by the City. She is past president of both Royal City Literary Arts Society and Federation of British Columbia Writers; and author of thirteen poetry books: the first A Split In The Water” (Fiddlehead Poetry Books 1979); and the most recent “The Water Poems” (Ekstasis Editions 2017). She is the recipient of the Bernie Legge Artist Cultural Award and recipient of Pandora’s Collective Citizenship award. Further info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/candice_james and http://www.candicejames.com.