Ice Age by Dorothy Livesay

Fire and Ice

Dorothy Livesay has always been direct and frank in her portrayal of women’s experiences, including their sexuality. She has spoken strongly of such things before in The Unquiet Bed, but never so personally and realistically as she does in Ice Age. Not inclined to hide behind circumlocutions, Livesay takes many risks in this book by portraying the desires of an aging woman driven by “an itch for the seven-inch/ reach the hard entry” and of a widow who “uses her hand to thrust/ [and] tries to recover/ the heave and wrestle.” Though most readers are no longer shocked by an open treatment of sexuality, more than a few, I think, will be taken aback at the thought that a woman, at that an old woman, and a Canadian woman, has written so directly about such goings-on. In fact, I’ve heard intelligent young women confess they were surprised at Livesay’s sexual poems and even at first put off by them. We like to think such things are beyond the interests or at least admission of someone in her position. It speaks well of Livesay that in this, her fifteenth book of poems, written toward the end of her career, she has faced her own sexuality so ingenuously.

But Ice Age takes even more chances in the way Livesay strikes a prophetic stance. As she says in the title poem,

Now who among us
will lift a finger
to declare I am of God, good?
Who among us
dares to be righteous?

The challenge is well put. These days it probably takes even more snuff to be righteous than to be candid. At least it does among the people I know.

Anyway, the ice age is upon us, or nearly upon us, Livesay cautions, its “endless rain/ eternal snow” bringing an end to the greening earth and what is greening within us. The book floats in warnings about fire and whirlwind that “will send us to cover,” about sexual aggression which corrodes us, about a stupidity which rips the earth to pieces. A lot of the poems voice Livesay’s concern that we are losing our best selves, failing to be what we are: “We, born to flourish/ in a heyday of sun/ and tumble to rubble/ when the ice age comes.”

The opening poem, “Why We Are Here,” suggests that people with special vision are chosen to melt the ice we have made and to release the fire and water “singing” in the earth. Those seers observe the currents of earth and sky, as Livesay does in the beautiful rhythms of “Blue Wind”: “the wild/ wood fields/ folding hills/ ever yielding/ ever flowing/ earth.” Having seen the imminent disasters facing the world, Livesay doesn’t sit down and hold her feet and cry. She celebrates life, as she has always done:

Against these,
blow and burn!
contrive to comprehend
survive to sway
to the will of the wind.

She is at her best in sounding an ecstatic or meditative tone in her nature poems. The intense energy and exuberance of those passages represent her greatest poetic strength. She has always had a dazzling lyrical gift — a talent that enables her to pull off endings that many other poets can’t manage and won’t even attempt. The final lines in “News from Nootka” are powerful: “Raven laid the sun in your lap:/ your mind caught fire.” When they succeed, Livesay’s poems usually end on that heightened, even revelatory, vision.

I said Livesay takes chances in playing the prophetic note. Sometimes she hits it off well. But the forewarnings sometimes turn into the cliché or exaggeration of failed prophecy. In “Time and Mrs. MacNair,” Livesay asks “Why aren’t women liberated/ in the nineteenth century,” then answers: “I know!/ Because the clock governed them/ like a tyrannical father.” The question, it seems to me, is lame enough, and the answer, especially the gratuitous “I know!”, is even less inspired. Hardly the stuff of prophecy. Or take the poem “Breadline.” In it Livesay manages to be very good and very bad. Her descriptions of a young gull (“O how he mews, he mews, “Such hunger!”) and his mother (with her “bread-laden” beak) are embarrassingly declamatory. But then the poem ends with a stunning expression of what the overwrought lines tried to say: “My sight is blurred/ their eyes carry the sun.”

“The Descent” offers an even better example of a poem divided in its successes and failures. The first two stanzas are superb in the boldness of their mythic vision:

I enter and am warm
in the dark cave
where mosses swarm
in slime on the rock wall
and water endlessly
registers no time

I have been in that place
of mucous and sweat
semen and swift blood
noon engendered
and I have seen
the toad’s cold eye
and touched his coat
and pulled from my body
the after-birth.

It’s hard to write better than that. But then the prophetic, almost professorial, voice takes over to let us know what the poem’s all about:

(Most men
cannot look on this
and women shun,
bury the truth)

Yet I cry:
unless you have eaten
of this foul excreta
identified
and swallowed it
you are not whole
you are not man.

The poet turns poseur and abandons the language of experience for the language of commentary. Unfortunately Livesay doesn’t let the poem speak for itself. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that for all her courage in opening up to new possibilities in Ice Age, Livesay still speaks euphemistically of “excreta”). It is going too far to insist, as some people do, the abstractions shouldn’t appear in poetry, but Livesay’s work would be better off if she would knock out some of them.

The declamations and abstractions creep into some of her poems because Livesay wants to be more than a lyric poet. She wants to face the issues that shake our lives. She cares about poverty and pollution and greed; she always has. But she doesn’t always handle those topics well. There’s nothing harder to write than “political” poetry which bears down on the important issues of an age. In Ice Age Livesay looks at the politics of growing old (movingly in “For Rent,” in “Aging”, and in “Legends” where she sees herself as a Sasquatch, “terrified hairy beast/ crying for shelter”; banally in “Salute to Monty Python” where her slang excruciatingly misses the mark in trying to be with it). She also has a go at sexism, again with varying results.

In Ice Age, as in her earlier writing, Livesay frequently focuses on children. Little wonder, since she shares with them an excitement and an openness to living, as do all good poets. However, the poems about childhood, like others in the book, often claim more than they can convince us of (though Livesay’s previous book, A Winnipeg Childhood, published in Winnipeg by Peguis, is full of charming vignettes that succeed because they don’t reach for the big point). “Five Months Young” speaks of “this small/ cradled baby/ who cannot speak/ whose blue eyes illumine/ every text.” There’s no reason why that couldn’t be the case. But the language invites us to believe what it fails to express. Maybe Livesay isn’t altogether convinced, either, when she speaks that way.

One poem about children that does come off well is “Parenthood”:

My child is like a stone
in wilderness
pick it up and rub it on the cheek
there’s no response
or toss it down.
only a hollow sound
but hold it in the hand
a little time
it warms, it curves
softly in to the palm:
even a stone takes on a pulse
in a warm hold.

Now that I look back at the poem, I see it contains no ejaculations and few generalized words. It is poignant in its quiet simplicity.

I’m finding myself coming toward the recognition that Livesay has superb talent as a lyrical poet. She effectively uses simple concrete words, and the expression of her vision is often breathtaking. But language often fails her, or she often fails it. Too often her speech exceeds the experience. I don’t think Livesay can always tell when that happens. That wouldn’t matter much if she had (and heeded) perceptive readers who might help her avoid the inflations. It’s too bad Livesay hasn’t had that kind of help, at least I’m assuming she hasn’t. She’s a good writer, she could be even better.

Dennis Cooley teaches at St. John’s College; he is a critic and editor with Turnstone Press. He is also the Poetry Editor of Arts Manitoba