Speech Dries Here on the Tongue

Eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

Reviewed by Pauline Holdstock

(Gordon Hill Press, 2025)

During the pandemic, Derek Mahon’s 1999 poem “Everything is Going to be All Right” apparently took a viral turn on the internet, its sudden popularity likely due to its message of hope in the face of unremitting gloom. Hard to imagine that today. Under the extremes of the climate collapse and all of the pressures it continues to bring—social, political, geo-political, ecological, economic, ideological—our response to the world has been severely, radically altered. Combing through the contributions of the twenty-one Canadian poets in the excellent anthology, Speech Dries Here on The Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, I could find only meagre suggestions of hope for the future and understandably fewer expressions of the kind of reassurance and comfort that the Mahon poem elicited in its time.
 
But perhaps it is connection rather than hope that such an anthology needs to offer. Perhaps its purpose is to connect with us at the visceral, the emotional level so that the next time we engage with our world our engagement will carry the charge forward. It is, after all, how hope for change edges closer to becoming reality in the human world: one human at a time. Mass movements for change have proved chimerical, often falling prey to legal backlash, social sabotage or outright corporate and even state-sanctioned attack; and perhaps Yeats was right: “peace comes dropping slow.”
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Art invites us, the editors say in their preface, “to reimagine our relationships with each other and with the earth. . . "As writers, we use our words to navigate the turmoil, alleviate our own suffering, and inspire others. Through speaking and writing, we reclaim power, not only over our own narratives, but in how we shape our collective futures. In this moment of profound loss, we are reminded that the voice can be a force for change, a means of healing.”  I found the whole project of this book to be deeply moving, not just for the honest, often searing renditions of the states of mental health endured or witnessed by some of the poets, but also for the fact that the printed poem would surely in itself constitute one of the most powerful messages for—not only ‘from’ but ‘for’—those engaged in the struggle: You are seen. You are not alone.
 
Karen Houle, also a contributor with a poem that takes us into the heart of a forest, writes a thoughtful introduction to the book, exploring the nature and purpose of poetry and linking it firmly to the interconnectedness of our world:

​Like it or not, every choice we make, everything we own, every action we take, every thought or idea we have, and every sound or word we utter, or write, or read, has ecological and political and material and emotional webs of interconnections [. . .] And our involvement in these webs [. . .] goes on and on in every direction, in space and in time, without discernible end.

The sensibility both of the preface and of the introduction carry deeply Buddhist implications: because we participate in the shifting patterns of living “thereness,” Houle suggests, “it can be changed.” The onus is on us to initiate healing in the world. Compassion heals us and can heal the planet. And Houle makes a pretty good case for poetry’s part in that, too: “Poems draw us close to their subject, expanding empathy and curiosity through nearness. Might poetry help you to notice and care about [. . .] your planet?”
 
Poet Khashayar Mohammadi might not agree. His contributions, the first in the book and also the source of the book’s title, are resolutely rooted in loss. Intensely personal, they are, nevertheless, an accurate representation of the current emotional climate: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just find construction cones scattered.”
 
Yet while joy and hope are understandably absent from this broad collection, their seeds, like those in Jennifer Wenn’s “Ode to an ‘Empty’ Lot”, can still be found by those who care to notice. Some of the poets, like Houle herself and Amanda Shankland, possess the eco-credentials and experience to bring wide-ranging observations to incorporate in their material. Others—equally effective, I should add—seem trapped in the immediate pain of the catastrophe as they struggle to respond, until, like Conyer Clayton using form in “Mountain Top Removal Glare” to capture both the enormity and the enormousness of the current destruction, they brilliantly succeed.
 
There’s a readiness, a need, in these poems, to rise to the challenge of adequately representing the mental toll of global environmental collapse. The sheer scale of what confronts us demands extreme measures. Enter Mariam Gowralli’s brave attempt “Reel Headaches”—complete with a Viewer Discretion warning—to insert her damaged self into an apocalyptic vision of worthy of Bosch and give us the climate catastrophe in a full-on “digital hellscape.”
 
Sydney Hegele’s prose poem “/psychodiagnostic assessment report/” is a compulsive journey into a remembered incident: the spare bones of the story appear in tandem on the page with phrases from a psychotherapist’s report replete with its ice-cold labels, the phrases of each mode —colloquial narrative/official report—juxtaposed alternately so that past and present exist—as they do in life—simultaneously.
 
Some of the entries in this extraordinarily rich and varied collection choose to take us directly into the first-person experience of mental crisis: Aaron Kreuter’s diptych, for instance, “Bad Moon Rising and Good Mood Fleeting”; Conal Smiley’s detached and unsettling “Mystery Ward”.
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Poems like gregor Y kennedy’s “Bipolar” seem to enact the breakdown not only of climate but of the mind under pressure, giving us through rhythm and syntax the speed of the advancing crisis. His “Prayer in the Age of Climate Change” slows down to examine its effect on us and considers in its very first lines, “All will be well and all will be well, Warbles the nuthatch from Norwich”, the possibility of hope. But it won’t stick. We will not receive the message; we sabotage the alarm bells, ignore the warnings, refuse to listen, and hope stalls:

​The glass ceiling
The concrete floor.
A sense of nowhere to go
Much less of home.

​—until eventually the speaker’s personal connection to the environment picks up the delicate thread again:

​Yet I know a certain patch of trilliums
On the brink of blooming
Who gesture with three green hands
A universal sign of hope

​Even so, the evidence before us overwhelms: 

​The forest fires
Have never raged so wild
So early.

and the intention of hope is quenched. (Mahon’s facile “Everything will be all right” could never have been written in our present predicament).
 
An equally powerful conclusion lands like a refreshingly sharp slap, a wake-up call to remove ourselves from the useless distractions of social media platforms in AJ Dolman’s “Contamination”:

​I snap a picture of the seething river below Zibi,
Post it to my socials.
 
“Sure the commute was a nightmare,
But the view from here is something.”
And count as my likes roll in.

​And there’s no speaking of wake-up calls without Kathryn Mockler. Astringency’s her trademark tool of choice to nail our complacency in “If It Keeps Me Calm”: 

You can’t live in fear . . .If I thought about how every little thing I buy and consume harms another person and contributes to mass death, inequity and the degradation of the planet, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

​Fiona Tinwei Lam’s “Three Senryu” draw from the same sharp spring. Three-line poems, they bite. Only what are we do with her third offering? Lam has managed to place a sliver of ambiguity within its mere twelve words. Are we to admire the stoic resolution of those who march each year—or simply shake our heads at such delusion?
 
This kind of close self-questioning is what almost derails Dominik Parisien’s “Failed Ode to an Unknown Tree?” But he manages to save it at the last moment:

​And yet here are words.
And here are a few more, seeded, maybe
like you, to make breath
possible.

​Exactly.
 
Tara McGowan-Ross’s prose poem on loss in the time of climate crisis, “If I had a son I would call him Ben,” addresses many aspects of our current plight without ostentation or bombast and without false hope. It’s dedicated to Ben Prunty, and is a carefully considered meditation on survival, both deeply personal and conspicuously wide-ranging, expertly using recurring images (the panic-box, for one) as leitmotif to give voice to complex and tricky thoughts. It, too, concludes with a forest fire. “When I was a child,” the piece begins, “a kind farmer told me that in the grip of disaster, it is best to loose the horses.” Later: “When I arrive on the other coast I am readied only for horrors, which makes me vulnerable to beauty.” And lastly: “When I arrive in the burnt forest I am ashamed to find it beautiful. Full of fire-scarred horses and their perfect children” and the breathtakingly beautiful close: “who don’t know any other way to be.” 

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​Pauline Holdstock writes literary fiction, essays and poetry. Her books have been published in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia, Brazil and Portugal as well as in Canada, where her work has been named a finalist for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. Her fiction has been anthologized in both Canada and the U.K. and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the BC Book Prizes. It has been awarded Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction and City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and won the Malahat Review novella contest. Her non-fiction has appeared in national newspapers and magazines and has been broadcast on CBC radio. It has been awarded the Prairie Fire Prize for Personal Journalism. Pauline has taught creative writing at the Victoria School of Writing and at the University of Victoria and served on the faculty of the Wired Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts.