by Theresa Kishkan
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2022/$24.99/208 pp.
The essay is an accommodating form; it can take on almost any subject. Essays also, according to the author of this new collection, “braid and weave and assemble patterns.” They may contain “moments of poetry, phrases of song, recipes for very good soup.” Or even capture “the velocity of human thought in real time.”
These descriptions should give the reader some idea of the openness with which Theresa Kishkan, a poet-cum-essayist, tackles the many subjects that make up her new collection: rivers she has known and loved, age-old methods of dyeing textiles, medical problems, the inspiration to be found in Dante, the joy of antique buttons. She is interested in origins—in families, in crafts—and her title essay reflects this, at least metaphorically. Blue Portugal, it turns out, is the name of a Czech wine which may or may not have the antecedents from far lands that it is purported to have.
Some of Kishkan’s most affecting essays and fragments have to do with her search for information about the lives of her forebears. Her mother became a foster child at birth, so couldn’t pass on that family knowledge. Kishkan focused instead on her paternal grandmother, who came to Drumheller, and later to Beverly (now a part of Edmonton) with five small children, leaving behind a home in what is now the Czech Republic—although the language she spoke was a dialect of Polish. Her grandmother’s first husband (who worked in the coal mines and died a few years later) had preceded her, and Kishkan was surprised to learn from her research that the home awaiting her grandmother in Canada was a squatter’s shack on the banks of the Red Deer River. No one seemed able to tell her where that squatter’s village had been located, but there was a rock face in the background of an old snapshot, and, by matching the strata, Kishkan believes she found the location.
When that site was surveyed, some of the squatters were permitted to buy the land their homes stood on, but those who came from countries that had been wartime enemies of the British were not. They had to either move their houses or see them levelled, a reminder that not all settlers in this country began from the same starting gate.
Our enjoyment of essays, I believe, depends very much on our sense of the person behind the pen, and Kishkan’s sensibility is an appealing one. It also depends on the response the writer can evoke in a reader. For me, Kishkan recalled the Bee Gees lyric:
It’s only words
And words are all I have
To take your heart away.
Merna Summers is an award-winning Edmonton author.
