Suburban Legends
by Joan Crate
Calgary: Freehand Books, 2009, ISBN 9781551119618, 82 pp., $16.95 paper.

Joan Crate's previous books of poetry--the first is in its sixth printing, and the second was short-listed for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award--are an indication that there remains life yet in the chosen poetic word. Her word choice tends to rely on simple, common words (which I suspect plays a large part in her popularity), but her careful selection and invigoration of them conveys a power to her readers.

This volume, Suburban Legends (printed "subUrban legends" on the opening page, and referred to in this configuration in the back cover blurbs) could be called The Snow White Poems. I admire the double connotation of the Latinate 'sub' with our modern evocation of the sprawling bourgeois nesting places just outside our cities, and those legends gestating under the surface of them. Pick your poison. In the fairytale Snow White is nearly poisoned by the wickedness of envy. Crate, knowing a poet does well in presentation, stirs up a collection of varied perspectives.

I am stalked by my selves, want to hunt and flee
build walls, install security systems
intimidate and litigate, tear apart
both predator and shivering prey (50)

To wit, she adds a couple of pages later: "We've all been fooled--/ following scripts and growing old" (52).

A definitive connection, or division, between the Snow White poems and autobiographical ones becomes difficult to tease out. Snow White as the suburban legend, or Snow White as the ironic Joan Crate character reflecting on her life--which it is I cannot say with certainty. And, why put any limitation on Crate's spunky writing? "After all, Snow White is a babe/ and far less fictional than an Internet porn site" (30). "Snow White's Tell-all Interview' recounts what happened after the tale ended, the chafing wedding rings, the suffocating dark castle of the prince, the inevitable falling apart, but Crate isn't through with her aging heroine yet. In "Snow White Gets Homesick" she pines to return to the idyllic woods with her beloved dwarves and chirping birds, and Crate sardonically adds, "she misses the innocence, her ignorance. . . / She longs for her young readers and what she gave them--/ the most delicious, most treacherous of lies" (64). I revel in her stubbornness, tending rose gardens and flashing the pearly smile. She is fine with ambiguity, the dark and light side by side, all the different paths down to the lake.

The last poem, "In Season," is more than a summing up. It is also a step into wisdom that a life lived without self-deception brings as a matter of course. Crate includes final observations cum admissions, that bend heavy with life at the branch's tip. The first, ostensibly, addresses her husband: "Look at me. Remember me this way,/ happy, grey and golden" (81). The second is addressed to Snow White:

. . . it's time to reconcile
with our injuries and questionable decisions.
It's in the dark season, dear one,
the lake dreams and re-visions. (82)

Andrew Vaisius is a writer and childcare worker living in Morden, Manitoba.