In her debut collection of poems, "Birch Split Bark", Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image - a birch bark canoe - to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender, myth to memory and hatred to reconciliation. These poems are brave and brilliantly voiced and her descriptions are as haunting as a loon's concerto on a silent summer lake. Guichon's characters speak to the plurality of Canadian identity; in four distinct voices, Guichon pulls apart the myths that have created us and continue to dictate who we must be. "Birch Split Bark" proves that canoes will always write history upon their waters just as poets will write humanity upon the page.
In her debut collection of poems, "Birch Split Bark", Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image - a birch bark canoe - to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender, myth to memory and hatred to reconciliation. These poems are brave and brilliantly voiced and her descriptions are as haunting as a loon's concerto on a silent summer lake. Guichon's characters speak to the plurality of Canadian identity; in four distinct voices, Guichon pulls apart the myths that have created us and continue to dictate who we must be. "Birch Split Bark" proves that canoes will always write history upon their waters just as poets will write humanity upon the page.
Diane Guichon is an MA graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Calgary.
Diane Guichon shows us that, like the birch shell of the canoe
itself, the poetry of our culture must eventually become a kind of
cradle, afloat, in which every Canadian learns to make love.
--Christian B�k
Diane Guichon's Birch Split Bark skillfully takes apart the canoe
as Canadian icon letter by letter. Her investigation of the deeply
personal in the midst of the nationally symbolic makes these poems
rich and complicated - she is a careful and thoughtful poetic
guide, unafraid of the depths that language leads her to.
--Suzette Mayr
She breaks open our traditional coherent canoe narrative by
invoking canoes and canoe myths from other places and cultures.
Though her tone varies, moving through a spectrum from intellectual
play to deep feeling, she constructs a book with unusual coherence
and unity by anchoring it firmly to the image, however fractured,
of the canoe ... the book as a whole is accomplished and
satisfying.
--Maureen Scott Harris, The Goose
Diane Guichon's Birch Split Bark lets language pick up the stroke
to ingeniously portray a contemporary suburban family in terms of
the canoe and canoeing - Canada's true national sport. We witness
the husband packing "pine pitch / salt pork and rum" in his
briefcase before heading to the office, the wife negotiating a
cocktail party as canoe trip, son Bobby viewing his sexual
orientation as a portaged canoe he can never put down, and daughter
Lily trying to use her father's fixation on the canoe as a means to
achieve closeness: to "build a canoe bridge over the father
chasm.
A canoe can seem fragile and preposterously slow compared to an
overpowered fibreglass runabout that can plane up to the head of
the inlet in less than fifteen minutes. Similarly, poetry can seem
outclassed as a means to understand the present state of the family
compared to the razzle-dazzle of jump-cut images or a cursory surf
through some site on the 'net. But Diane Guichon's well-wrought
characters convincingly reveal - through their complex relation to
the transportation device that built this country, and that
continues to loom large in Canada's imagination and recreation -
slow does not always mean weak. Her tough, supple verse also
illustrates how blitzing through the world insulates you from
seeing clearly where you are, let alone from identifying for
yourself a more appealing destination than the goal that the
salesman of your high-powered device assured you was best to aim
for. Guichon's poems - streamlined, low draft, human-propelled -
confidently take the reader into places in the Canadian family
where louder, larger and quicker craft would not dare to
venture.
--Tom Wayman
In the four voices of a family - father, mother, son and daughter -
Diane Guichon glides through the murky waters of relationships
using the quintessentially Canadian leitmotif of a birch-bark canoe
in her debut collection of poetry. One might be wary an entire
collection balanced on such an iconic symbol, but it would be a
misplaced fear. This is smart, sassy, tender writing that twists
with unexpected narrative moments. It sustains the paddling theme
with smooth strokes, portages over conflicting family expectations
and glides stable and true through the uncharted territory of life
and love.
--The Calgary Herald
Guichon is adventurous, dipping into haikus, found, shaped and
sound poetry. And her writing style is accomplished, especially
when she explores a single character, such as John: "while the
canoe hibernates in storage/ he totals the weight of years spent
in/ paper labour." Birch Split Bark pinpoints the intersections
between family, survival and the canoe...
--Broken Pencil
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