Calling It Back To Me

The poetry collection, Calling It Back to Me, by Laurie D. Graham and published by McClelland & Stewart needles together an intricate lace-work textile of maternal family history that resonates with a transparency and conviction to give voice to the women of her lineage. Resulting in an eclectic veil to pull over the face, there is mourning and there is healing. 

In search of knowing the women who came before her who were unable to leave behind their voices or stories, Graham contemplates the brevity and weight of living that propelled these women to endure, or to perish, and to survive. In conducting an inquiry into the women who came before her, Graham navigates what brought her maternal Great-Grandmothers to the prairies and how well they fared transplanted to new lands. 

The dedication of Calling It Back to Me is written like a poem. Single words and fragments of words are spread across the page. The spaces between this textual residue speaks volumes as to the feeling of the collection. 

“She was born/ and she vanished/ no record/ no standardized/ spelling/ her name vanished/ her vanished/ names/ written by men/ These pages are for her.” 

What is left out? 

What was not said? 

What they could not say. 

Divided into four sections, “Calling It Back to Me,” “The Great-Grandmothers,” “Toward an Origin Story,” and “A Good Closing,” Graham traces a journey of reclamation, a calling back. Writing through apertures of missing voice, Graham enters into a space of being that testifies and gives shape to the women of her family. “Sometimes/ a family doesn’t have/ a story-keeper.” Graham becomes the story-keeper. 

Laurie D. Graham is a Canadian poet, editor and publisher whose work is deeply attentive to the intersections of place, inheritance and the difficult narratives that shape a sense of home. Raised in Treaty 6 Territory near amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), Graham has lived in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg, since 2018. 

She is the publisher of Brick magazine and has worked as an editor of poetry and prose for more than two decades. Her four collections, Rove, Settler Education, Fast Commute, and Calling It Back to Me, trace a poetic practice that moves between the lyric, the long poem, and found forms. Graham examines the relationships between personal inheritance and larger histories of settlement and environmental change. Rove was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, while both Settler Education and Fast Commute were nominated for the Ontario Trillium Book Award for Poetry. With Calling It Back to Me, Graham turns her attention inward toward familial history while confronting the colonial histories embedded within her own inheritance.

Graham combed through familial primary documents, birth certificates, census records, ship’s records and photographs to carve out the shape of her Great-Grandmother’s lives. “The end of fertile months/is a mourning process./ The conscious end/ of a maternal/ line, also/ a mourning process.” The collection gives space to grieve what was lost and to imagine conversations that could not happen between women. “This is the reckoning process./ to be careful, precise/ about my thanks./ Would they be happy,/ would they be dismayed/ to see me here in this future.” That imagining enables the scope of where a family tree has rooted to, the weight of ancestry and the hardship of lives that came before her. There is responsibility and moral holding of existence.  

In the section, “Great-Grandmothers,” the reader learns of three of Graham’s ancestors. Lily McClughan, arrived April 28, 1923, age 27. “Sailing across with/ two toddlers and eight months pregnant/ and not a word from her survives.” What is known of this woman is passed on down through oral archives. “You couldn’t get her off an idea.” The strength of a personality to carry on such memories. Then, there is Sophia Czyzowski, arrived November 23, 1911, age 26. Lastly, there is Elizabeth Percy, arrived spring 1903, age 31. Each archive a different style of poetics, divergent lenses to catch a glimpse of women who could not leave a story behind. 

Graham is humble in stitching the story of her ancestry together, she knows that the narrative contains holes and projections. “With my own unspoken/ parting story,/ hooking my strings/ between points on the globe,/ expecting answers.” The answers will not come, not the answers that are needed. Graham ends with the final lines of the collection, “all the countless negatives./ All the notes I won’t remember.” There is loss in not fully knowing, calling back what can be grasped and translated through poetry what can be. 

In the acknowledgements, Graham speaks further to her Great-Grandmothers. She expresses gratitude “as your lives become ‘fragments and guesswork.’ I feel and hope I now know a bit more about you. Much, though, remains unknown and unknowable. So this gratitude comes with apology to my family for the speculation and assumption I affix to these pages.” Calling back authenticity and catharsis, Graham can only do so much with what is left out. 

Thank you to Laurie D. Graham, McClelland & Stewart and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.