by Shawna Lemay
PALIMPSEST PRESS
2024/$21.95/264 pp.
Speaking on the still life as subject matter, Shawna Lemay claimed in a recent interview that she has essentially been writing “one continuous book” over the years. Her published oeuvre has indeed been faithful to her primary obsession with this form of art and the way it reverberates throughout her life, from marriage to an artist, to parenting a daughter, working at a library, travelling in Rome and other preoccupations. Apples on a Windowsill is by far her most expansive book on still life, art, poetry and living. Split into four sections, her essays delve deeply into visual arrangements and their aesthetic inspirations, along with other original pieces such as her reflections on Bruce Springsteen’s music, what such terms as “ugliness” or “expertise” might connote, her heterochromic (differently coloured) eyes, and, in the longest segment, a two-year series of diary entries reflecting on how COVID-19 impacted our ability to see, relate and connect.
If you’ve never read Lemay, this is a comprehensive text. If you’ve followed the Edmonton author’s work for years, Apples on a Windowsill can feel repetitive at times, in relation to her prior works but also within this collection itself. A more precise, typo-free and reader-considerate edit would have assisted one to inhabit her obsession wholly without occasionally becoming mired in it. That said, there is something completely compelling about being beckoned into this world. So many coils of lemon peel! A multitude of flowers, real, photographed, painted, dying. Books in stacks. A pandemic compulsion to purchase and create art assemblages from junk food such as Kraft dinner and Coke cans. Lemay’s tone is honed to draw in a reader with its combination of exquisite details, wavering doubts (wondering if her Springsteen engagement constitutes “lame fan behaviour,” say, or worrying about Instagram “likes”), and her complex interweaving of allusions and references from Chardin to Cixous and from Oppen to Maier.
An introduction would have been helpful to contextualize the years these essays were written. It could also have framed the new manifestations of this still life obsession in relation to Lemay’s past books on the topic, such as Calm Things, Asking or The Flower Can Always Be Changing. In this book, superb examples of Lemay’s still life photos are found in essays such as “On Claiming your Expertise” and at the end of “An Ugly Woman,” but the collection would have been enhanced by further or more interval-spaced visuals. Overall, however, the reader will emerge from this exquisite, delicious and honest engagement realizing that they “deserve beauty” in their lives to both endure and to celebrate the honour of living on.
Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).
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