Interim: Essays & Meditations

Antigonish Review, Autumn, 2007 by Rob McLennan

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Interim: Essays & Meditations by Patrick Friesen. (Hagios Press, 2006. 143 pp. $17.95)

Long known as a poet, as well as a playwright, teacher, musician and translator, Vancouver poet Patrick Friesen recently released Interim: Essays & Meditations, a collection of non-fiction pieces written over a period of some twenty years. Paul Wilson's Hagios Press, founded a few years ago in Regina, has been publishing a number of interesting books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including a thirtieth anniversary edition of Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (2006), and manages to provide an interesting counterpoint to the work being produced by Saskatchewan peers Coteau Books in Regina, and Thistledown Press in Saskatoon. In Interim, Patrick Friesen works through a number of concerns he's had over the years and worked through many of his twelve poetry collections including religion, family, travel, memory, poetry, music and geography, most of which have all existed through his poetry for years. As his Introduction begins, "At forty I begin to realize I had a history." He writes further on into the piece:

   Part of this book is a recognition of that
   history, a history that is both apart from,
   and a part of, me; a history of how the
   adult learns to misplace what's true, and
   sometimes finds a way back. Finding
   some of these pieces made me curious.
   Where had some particular idea come
   from, where had the tone in another piece
   come from, or gone to? Contradictions
   everywhere but, then, contradictions are
   not a problem; the elimination of them
   can be.

When working back years through anyone's published work, it's easy to see the threads that weave from collection to collection, poem to poem, and Friesen's concerns in Interim. Essays & Meditations are ones that he has had inside his body perhaps the entire stretch of his life. Working through religion, family and music, the threads become so intertwined throughout twenty-eight short prose pieces that they become nearly inseparable. As he begins the piece "There Was Always Music," he writes:

   From the beginning there was music. Can't remember a time it wasn't
   there in one form or another. Probably the greatest constant in my
   life. Mother was always singing. Hymns sometimes but often English
   folk songs, Scottish and Irish ballads. She had a fine soprano
   voice, often sang in church. Once, when she was about twenty-one
   years old, and me a one-year-old child in my father's lap, she
   recorded "O Holy City" in some walk-in recording joint on Portage
   Avenue in Winnipeg. Cost her a dollar or so. I know this happened.
   I own the recording, the date on it. She also played the piano a
   lot. Often, at the end of the day, with me lying in bed. Playing me
   to sleep.

What makes the book so effective is the accidental deliberateness of it as a whole; even though some of these pieces were written some ten, fifteen or even twenty years apart, they flow very naturally one into the other, and work almost as some sort of memoir of Friesen's thinking life. Born in Steinbach, Manitoba and raised in a Mennonite community just outside of Winnipeg, Friesen lived in Winnipeg for most of his adult life, until moving to Vancouver in the 1990s, where he currently teaches at Kwantlen University College. Over the years, Friesen has published eleven trade collections of poetry, including the lands I am (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1976), bluebottle (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1978), The Shunning (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1980), Unearthly Horses (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1984), Flicker and Hawk (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1987), You Don't Get To Be a Saint (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992), Blasphemer's Wheel." Selected and New Poems (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1994), A Broken Bowl (London ON: Brick Books, 1997), St. Mary at Main (Winnipeg MB: The Muses' Company, 1998), Carrying The Shadow (Vancouver BC: Beach Holme Publishing, 1999), the breath you take from the lord (Madeira Park BC: Harbour Publishing, 2002) and the chapbook Bordello Poems (Vancouver BC: Vancouver Film School, 2004), as well as two CDs, small rooms and Calling the Dog Home, two plays, The Shunning (which he adapted from the book) (Toronto ON: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1987) and The Raft, and three translations he did from Danish with Per Brask, God's Blue Morris by Niels Hav (Crane Editions, 1993), The Woods by Klaus Heeck (Crane Editions, 1998) and A Sudden Sky by Ulrikka Gernes (London ON: Brick Books,). Talking about his (as he called it) "terrain of southeastern Manitoba" in an interview with Clarice Foster in CV2 magazine in 2002, Friesen states:

   That's where I was seeded. That's were I grew up. This terrain, its
   climate, flora and fauna, its people, everything, are ingrained in
   me as a human, as a writer. I live on the west coast, and I grow to
   know more about it all the time, but it won't ever be me. I am that
   prairie, specifically southeastern Manitoba, "kid." It informs
   everything I do. It is my thinking. I think prairie, whatever that
   means (another conversation). That doesn't mean it doesn't connect
   with thinking going on elsewhere. It does. It's not, to my mind,
   provincialism; it's just another angle.