by Sarah Klassen
Winnipeg
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Walter Hildebrandt’s Winnipeg From the Fringes is not the first collection of poetry inspired by this prairie city. Clive Holden’s Trains of Winnipeg, Patrick Friesen’s St Mary & Main are two previous celebrations of Winnipeg that come to mind. Like Holden’s book, this one is generously illustrated; like Friesen’s, it revisits an ex-Winnipegger’s favourite haunts.
In “Winnipeg I,” the first poem in the collection:
“You enter this city
on tracks
cold and hard
[that]...
penetrate
the heart of the city.” (11,13)
These lines are typical of Hildebrandt’s spare style and his frequent tendency to scatter words across the page. The poem is direct, taut, sensual and ends with the train’s wail.
Photographs of railway tracks by Ron A. Drewniak accompany this poem, the colours sombre, the light subdued and the rails mesmerizing. It is tempting to page through the book, skipping the poems, to see further pictures of Winnipeg that range from office towers at the city centre to junk piles to the work of local artists, to water and trees on the outskirts.
The poems are equally varied. Lyrical pieces like “Trees Move” (130) and “Spring”(132) touch on change and loss seen in terms of the natural cycles of growth and decay. “The Spirit of Winnipeg” is a portrait of one of the city’s denizens who “wanders the downtown streets” and returns to “where the train stopped/ to let them out/ stepping out onto Main.” Drinking at the old Aberdeen Hotel, this wanderer remembers “cleaning building city streets” but also recalls “his mother’s old country/ hot cabbage soup’s/ inside/ the soul of his dream.” (52, 54) Like so many Winnipeggers, he has come from elsewhere and carries with him memories of another place, another life.
From the pub to the birth room of the Women’s Pavilion to the Exchange District, this city tour in text and image does not by-pass the grungier areas, the traces of neglect, the detritus of industry, the “junk heaps/lit up/ from the motel’s neon pink”. (“Outskirts” 137) Hildebrandt has a keen eye for easily-overlooked details; he gathers them like stones or flowers, names them, and builds poems with them, preferring simple description to complicated or selfconscious metaphor.
The figure of a small girl, Mary (the narrator’s daughter), flits through the poems, lending a spot of innocence, the way light falling on buildings and landscape, injects brightness into the photos.
“A Butterfly,” one of the long poems in the collection, recounts the life of a Mennonite woman, a relative of the narrator. She has lost her faith “After lumber camps, lost brothers and sisters/ A son’s death” in the Soviet Union. Now, living in Germany, she enjoys TV, makes “Mennonite soups/ handmade dumplings” and ...
At 76
She found joy in vineyards
In seeing light fall on the paper-thin miracle
of butterfly wings. (31)
The link between this woman and Winnipeg are photos of the Heritage Centre at Canadian Mennonite University where stories like hers are housed in the archives. Unfortunately not all readers will be able to identify these (and other) images, and may wish for an appendix of captions for the photos.
Photos of St John’s College—seen through bars of a window—are interspersed with the text of another long poem, “Toll,” which critiques a system of education that is punctuated by regularly tolling bells, “where the British accent is still in” and where students are told: “that the poor/ are poor partly/ by accident and/ partly/ through their own fault.” (142)
“The Same Old News” (86) displays equal frustration with social injustice. Hildebrandt prefaces this poem by quoting Soren Kierkegaard and conveys his ire by deconstructing words and letting them fly across the page. Photos of abandoned bashed-up vehicles aptly accompany the text.
Several poems, less agenda-driven than “Toll” and “The Same Old News”—and arguably more satisfying— veer away from cityscape, nature and portraiture to celebrate the work of local artists: Bill Lobchuk’s painting of sunflowers and Michael Olito’s installation, a windcatcher kept inside though it,
Needs
wind
[to]
Make
it part of
things bigger
than itself. (112)
Hidebrandt’s book is born out of a poet’s memories, memories fanned by the wind of nostalgia and transformed by imagination. An attentive reading will reveal a city “Bigger than itself.”
Page revised: 3 December 2019
