Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead

Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead (2023) by Catherine GrahamCatherine Graham

Poetry

Wolsak and Wynn, 2023

170 pages

ISBN: 9781989496633

$20.00

Reviewed by Tara Wohlleben

 

 

Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead selects poems from Catherine Graham’s works published over the last 20 years–Pupa (2003), The Red Element (2008), Winterkill (2010), Her Red Hair Rises with The Wings of Insects (2013), and The Celery Forest (2017)—and places them chronologically after new poems that open the collection for a total of six sections in the book.

The first section is the newest and shows how Grahams’s poetry lives in a liminal space. In the titular poem “Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead” she tells us “To think story is to construct from that other realm / where jade water cools fire’s friction. Pockets where pleasure finds memory. / Take this nosegay, touch intuition, before we float off the page.”

The next section takes us back to her first published work, Pupa. The poems in this section reflect mainly on her childhood and end with the poem “Imago,” showing her growth from that point. “My life as larva has ended / … / Dawn, the quiet. Imago Up.”

Her next book, The Red Element, draws on her childhood but moves into travel. The opening poem “Window Washer Sings at the Terminal” takes us to an airport where “His song as edged us / to the clarity of sweet loss and the window / is ready now for wings to fly through it.” There is no clear path for the speaker here.

Winterkill returns to Graham’s childhood quarry with some fantasy elements. In “More Than Horse” we see Graham describe a unicorn, tired of expectations and wanting to be recognized for what it is. “They have forgotten the billy-goat beard, / the lion’s tail, the cloven hooves. // Horse. / I am more than horse.”

Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects features poems in conversation with the late poet Dorothy Molloy, borrowing her lines when needed. The section opens with one of Graham’s own expressing grief at the death of her father. In “To the Animal He Met in The Dark” Graham addresses the deer that caused her father to crash his car: “Nothing to see in the darkened windshield— / just the last expression on my drunk father’s face.”

The last section is The Celery Forest, poems that deal with Graham’s battle with breast cancer. “Glass Animals” reminds the reader where they started as it echoes “Girl with Glass Animals” from Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead. The journey has come full circle and we look again at the newer poems, but with more accustomed eyes.

Catherine Graham is a Creative Writing instructor at the University of Toronto. Her sixth collection of poems, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. She has been a finalist for the Sarton Book Award, the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Toronto Book Award.  She won the Miramichi Reader Award for Best Fiction, an IPPY Gold Medal for Fiction, and the Fred Kerner Book Award. She was one of the judges for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Her other publications include The Most Cunning Heart (2022), Quarry (2017), and Aether: An Out of Body Lyric (2021).