Finding Ft. George

Antigonish Review, Summer, 2008 by Rob McLennan

Finding Ft. George

by Rob Budde. (Madeira Park BC: Caitlin Press, 2007, 112 pp., $15.95)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So much about poetry in Canada seems to be about physical movement, and watching how various writers, through the process of moving geography, have shifted their writing as well, both through obvious markers (writing about their new location) or in shifts of line, breath and structure, whether Patrick Friesen and Jon Paul Fiorentino moving away from Winnipeg to Vancouver, and Montreal, respectively, the shifts east from Alberta to the dislocations of Monty Reid ' s Disappointment Island

(Chaudiere Books, 2006) and finally, placement, in his Luskville Reductions

(London ON: Brick Books, 2008), to Rob Budde, who moved from Winnipeg in 2000 to teach at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. Part of this geographic and poetic shift is coming out in more obvious ways through his most recent poetry collection Finding Ft. George

. The author of a number of books over the years, he ' s published the poetry collections Catch as Catch

(Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1994) and traffick

(Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1999), the novels Misshapen

(Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1997) and The Dying Poem

(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003) and the short prose-fiction collection flicker

(Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2005), as well as editing In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets

(Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2003).

I like that I can always count on Budde to remind me about so much happening up there in Prince George, British Columbia, whether through his blog or through the publication of his chapbook series, wink books. Located half-way up the province, and the home of the Carrier Sekani people for thousands of years, the City of Prince George rests on the site of a river junction discovered by Europeans in 1807 when explorer Simon Fraser passed through where the Nechako River joins the Fraser (the story goes, had Alexander MacKenzie found the join during his canoe trip of 1793, the town would probably have been named after him). Fraser went on to build a tiny outpost on the site he called Fort George, after King George III. Budde ' s Finding Ft. George

is a collection of a number of small pieces, including the seven part poem " Finding Ft. George, " that talks almost as Budde writing his introduction to the city that has become his home, writing of the place itself, the people he found there, and mundane elements such as looking for a home, and working to place his own future through, among other things, the past of a northern logging town.

dear pg/4

purdy ' s cariboo horses aren ' t

here, really

he is, the beer and gruff

grasp on what it means

to have balls (barry says

he pulled that one)

or more

foley ' s cache, stewart names

the past, ft. george

the traces of settlement sediment

piling up to the big

boxes in college heights and

the moonscape subdivisions

gargoyles of vinyl siding

it ' s about leaving the cities, fully.

back and forth history slides i

swing hearing fawcett and thesen

creeley and the lines

highway and rail intersecting

river taking us all away

pg is writing, worrying

over the line, what it is taking us for.

For those who might not know, Budde is pulling on obvious histories of writers both currently living and working in Prince George (John Harris, Barry McKinnon and Ken Belford) and others long left (Brian Fawcett and Sharon Thesen; even though she was born in Saskatchewan, she was raised in Prince George), or who came through to do readings (with small publications) through McKinnon over the years in his position as events organizer / Gorse Press publisher, including Robert Creeley and Al Purdy. Thanks in many ways to McKinnon moving up there for teaching work in 1969, there is a lot of literary history up there in that old logging town of Prince George.

dear pg/7

i dreamt of this place six years

before i saw it for the first time;

cutbanks and evergreens, the draws

and eskers pliant to the lull of river sleep

i dreamt prince george before it was

fish flash, a brown hand, a willow basket

prince george like an ice dam, flotsam

caught against the jam of bush

you see them, deriding the cops, imbibing and

disdainful--the bush people, from outside yet

land and spirits are not so separable--

the undergrowth grows over, back

out beyond what we blue-printed

the tallest building in prince george

unlivable, watches smoke, the churning

of products through machines and mouths

nostalgia is the thoughts we have when nothing

else works

Budde ' s writing has really opened up since he moved west and then north to teach at the University of Northern British Columbia; immersed for some time in considerations of the long poem and the open form, his work lately has been following a path set by, among others, Belford through his own " eco-poetry, " combining the ecological lyric with the realities of the old pulp mill town. There almost seem echoes through the small collection of McKinnon ' s own chapbook Death of a Lyric Poet