About this book

Published 2010 by the University of Alberta Press

ISBN: 978-0-88864-539-5

Alice Major writes: In 2007, my parents died within six weeks of each other. I had been looking after them for several years, through my father’s Alzheimer and my mother’s cancer, but their deaths were sudden, breath-takingly sudden.

I followed my mother’s body all the way to crematorium. The men there were kind and warned me that when they opened a particular door, I would see “the retorts.” Even in the immediacy of grief, I registered the unexpectedness of the word – a word that came from the alchemist’s workshop, originally for the glass beaker with its long spout used to capture steam. Later, the word was picked up by the Industrial Revolution for a particular kind of furnace used in steel-making. It had come a long way from its Latin root, meaning to curve back, to reply.

In the sudden silence of my life, I wrote most of this collection. I started by looking up the history of cremation, surprised to realize how recent a technology it is. The first furnace for disposing of dead bodies was exhibited in 1873, at the Vienna Exposition. Of course the funeral pyre is far older, by the modern version was a response to what the nineteenth century was realizing to be a problem – the crowded graveyards of newly crowded cities.

That started me thinking of all the technologies that shaped my mother’s life and how new they were to her. The ‘talkies’ – the musicals of the 1930s that she loved – had been invented less than 10 years earlier. They were newer to her than the internet is to a teenager today.

And then I remembered a little incident from my father’s final years. I was in a coffee shop with him while he watched a toddler being bounced on its father’s lap. Dad was smiling and making the peek-a-boo faces that we make with little ones, and it suddenly struck me that – by the time this little boy lived to be in his eighties – his life and my father’s together would bracket more than a century and a half. The immediacy of the past washed over me. What we think is long gone is the merest handclasp away. My parents’ lives were directly shaped by the late 1800s, and mine is shaped by theirs. So I started to tell the story of my mother’s life through the inventions – both technical and social – of the Industrial Age.

This book is about how one thing turns into another. During the quiet winter, I was also reading Richard Dawkins’ book, The Ancestors Tale. Once again, the incredible connectedness of the deep past washed over me, all the tiny, tiny steps that created the variety of life on this planet. I found myself writing the linked sonnets of Time is how. It’s not so much a crown of sonnets – that old form where the last line of one poem becomes the first line of the next until you get back to the first line again. It’s more a tiara. Lines/phrases from the first sonnet become the title of the following poems, and the final sonnet is made up of pieces from the first 13. It seemed to echo the way that DNA gets swapped around. A tiara doesn’t get back to where it started, but its curve is linked all the way.

The final set of poems about my parents’ marriage takes its titles from the processes that alchemists used to try and create the philosophers’ stone, that marvelous transformative goal that was never quite achieved. Yet the effort led to so much.

The muses were the daughters of memory. Grief makes memory overwhelming, even the smallest recollection is so sharp a shard. Yet it is through those memories we recover.

Reviews

“…tender, wise, beautifully cadenced work which embraces the reader on every page … Her authoritative proficiency comes from a deep understanding of the complexities of aesthetic risks, and the elegance of those risks are so lightly manifested, so luminous, as to  make the world newly visible.”

– Don Domanski

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Copies can be purchased through the University of Alberta website.