The Martha Landscapes

By Colleen Thibaudeau

Readers of Colleen Thibaudeau's selected poems, My Granddaughters Are Combing Out Their Long Hair, will feel at home in The Martha Landscapes, where domestic dearness and the exotic, like strangers, "make their first acquaintance….. in a blur of words." The cross-relationships that occur, in a poetry of technical virtuosity that feels as easy as breathing, are sensed to be permanent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 1984
• ISBN: 9781771312165

Colleen Thibaudeau

Colleen Thibaudeau Reaney, poet and beloved wife of James Reaney, passed away on February 6, 2012 in London, Ontario. Colleen’s poems and short stories have appeared in magazines and journals since 1945.

Book preview

The

Martha

Landscapes

© Colleen Thibaudeau, 1984

ISBN 978-1-771312-16-5

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

CONTENTS

Last night I dreamed…

The Glass Cupboard

My Grandmother's Sugar Shell, Ontario Baroque

Margaret's Water Colours

All My Nephews Have Gone to the Tar Sands

Malcolm Working

A Page Of Rage

The Blue of the Swimming Pool

The Beautiful Horses of the Camargue

Janet's Post Card From Brazil

Little Anne Running, Big Anne Shopping & Another Anne's Mysterious Visiting Birds

from Verlaine's Impressions

Poem (for Al Purdy): Rules for Spinning

Poem from Alice Boissonneau's Eileen McCullough

Poem from Anne Sexton's Letters: Lost everything, almost everything

About Noon

The Tin Shop

A Tree for St. T.

Inwhich I Realize I Meant To Clean Up My Brother's House

The Dieppe Gardens Poems

Sociable People Wondering What I Do

The Tomato Pickers Observed

Beatie's Palaces

St. Thomas: the great Heat Wave of ’36

from Throgmogle & Engestchin: A relationship

Inwhich I Become Confused, the End of the World Being Imminent

Parodies

1. Margaret Atwood, Presolstice

2. Raymond Souster, The Worm

3. W.W.E. Ross, There's a Fire in the Forest

4. Al Purdy, The Rattlesnake

5. Phyllis Gotlieb, Ordinary Moving

Notes for the crash sequence in Poet to Tower

from the planned woodlot to the freedom of Mrs. Field

The Martha Landscapes

Acknowledgements

Last night I dreamed about you all under the Star Over the House Quilt;

I remember mother making it: the little squares of jonquil window lit

The doors, shutters often green. Your block has still the hollyhock (french knots)

Mine has the lilac (front yard), looking hard the lilacs still are blooming there,

The real ones down — time and town development don't affect the quilt.

Each of us, house body, and the star, the star-filled head;

Each of us bedded down lifetime dreams the star-filled town

Waking goes walking the houses of our own making, talking the blocks away.

I might move into you taking on hollyhock      but it's not

Me really just the dreaming of the star-filled head.

The Star Over the House Quilt she made it extra size;

Her eyes puzzled out each stitch; she declared her fingers to be all pricked

And she licked the blood from roofs, sidewalks, from the small yards

With the ever-blooming trees pointing to the