Out of the half-wild mystery of rural homesteads and roadside forests in Tanya Standish McIntyre’s poetry emerges another mystery of multi-generational memory curled into her own country childhood – rich with imagination, a thoughtful eye, and her grandfather’s reliably comforting presence. Among the teeming spring-fed culverts and green copses are young people (including her own mother) who grew up and into local marriages, bound to limitations even in these wide-open spaces. 

The studied womanly art never meant to be

perfected, of reconciling resignation

with acceptance, linking back

to the distant past, looping around

to present…

In these rural Quebec landscapes, Standish McIntyre paints a socially constructed working class divide where the right words, skills, and education are said to point the way up and forward – even though the value and scope of country knowledge is vast and communally held, as cataloged in the poem “Subject Matter” and others:

 

My grandfather and I talk

……………………about things like this

…………………………………..and worlds and worlds more

while the rest 

…………………..go for silly Sunday drives

and think I must be bored.

 

The worlds of Standish McIntyre’s poems are themselves wide, with plenty of room to move freely, even when they glimpse into regretful pasts and heartbreaking deaths. That sense of liveliness and freedom imparts critical distance and empathy rather than judgment, aligning the natural cycles of life and death with life-altering tragedy and sorrows – everything may pass, but that doesn’t mean it disappears from all memory or the earth. 

 

now, no one remembers it but me and how the perfect

ding-dong of the green front-doorbell

is whorled in a two-note helix with some filament

of my brain, but gone

 

as though it never was, is the way 

you said my name.

mRb