Gifts: Poems for Parents

I'm always a little wary of theme anthologies, particularly when the theme is simple, benign and universal; there is a tendency for such collections to read as though they were produced by Hallmark. This one couldn't be more different. Tregebov is a poet of infinite skill and bottomless sincerity and an editor by profession. She combines all these facts in this perfectly put together collection of two dozen Canadian poets ... The poems are little carvings made from blocks of language ... Although I have never been a parent and stoutly deny having ever been a child, I was drawn into the book at once.

Now, this may seem a strange way to try to sell you on a book, but have you noticed how much greeting cards cost lately? Personally, I favour the all-occasion, nice-picture, blank-inside version. No trite, simplistic, watered-down greeting-card verse. Please.

But there is a reason why we buy those cards, with their pre-packaged sentiments - actually, several reasons. One is the feeling that someone else is going to say it better than you ever will (the Cyrano de Bergerac effect). The other is that it's easier to mouth the words of someone else than risk totally embarrassing yourself (the karaoke effect). Finally, I believe there is something in us that simply thrills to find our thoughts and emotions are larger than ourselves, that everything we think or feel has already been thought or felt by someone else (the Shakespeare effect).

My point (and I do have one) is that there is a place for poetry in daily life and that it's a pity people settle for pale substitutes. I've been reading a book this week called Gifts: Poems for Parents, edited by Rhea Tregebov (Sumach Press, $16.95). The collection takes its title from a poem by the late Bronwen Wallace that starts out with a son crying in his room because he realizes the gift he gave his mother doesn't fit.

There is a poem by Michael Redhill on the birth and near-loss of his daughter. A poem by Elisabeth Harvor about the moment of being separated from her child in a crowd and the thought, upon finding him again, that "Until this moment I never knew what love is."

Vancouver's own David Zieroth describes in his poem "Birth" the experience of adjusting to parenthood and watching his daughter grow:

making noises that sound like questions
filling in a space around us
we didn't know was there

It's been a while since I worked on the marketing side of books, but reading this one made me think that it's all very well to sell Gifts: Poems for Parents in bookstores, but where it could really take off would be in card shops. That's the place to reach the people looking for someone to say what they mean, but say it better. This book costs less than $20 and would easily fit inside a small mailing envelope.

Or what about placing it in the racks at checkout aisles in supermarkets? ... What if you were standing there with your last-minute pre-cooked rotisserie chicken, your frozen vegetables and your loaf of pseudo-homebaked bread and you opened a book to this:

Asleep, the two of you,
daughter and son, in separate cribs,
what does it matter to you
that I stand watching you now,
I, the mother who did not smile all day,
who yelled Go away, get out, leave me alone
when the soup pot tipped over on the stove,
the mother who burned the muffins
and hustled bed-time, tight-lipped

From "Nursury, 11:00 PM" by Robyn Sarah

Having children can make you more forgiving of your parents. So, too, does reading something like Michael Ondaatje's poem "Bearhug" about finding his son in his room at bedtime, standing with his arms outstretched, waiting for a goodnight hug. How long, the father wonders, did the son stand there waiting? The perfection of the poem is the way it allows you to inhabit the consciousness of the parent and the child at the same time. The needing and the being needed. Hard to imagine anything more universal than that.

And of course, universality is what poetry has to offer. The large made small and the small made large. There is a hunger for meaning in our lives that we try to appease with diversions and entertainments and quick cures. But sometimes the soul needs feeding with something a little meatier than chicken soup. That's why stocking up on poetry is never a bad idea.

To return to the greeting-card idea: There is a card company whose slogan is "Care Enough to Send the Very Best." Now I'll leave it to you to decide if poets such as Michael Ondaatje, P.K. Page, Margaret Atwood, Bronwen Wallace and others might be able to come up with something better than "Thinking of you across the miles."