From the Poplars

By Cecily Nicholson

BC Book Prize, Poetry: Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Winner)

In the North Arm of British Columbia’s Fraser River lies an uninhabited island. Guarded by water from the city of New Westminster’s bustling industrial and shipping district, Poplar Island is lush and unspoken, but storied. It is the traditional territory of the Qayqayt peoples. Made into property, a parcel of land belonging to the “New Westminster and Brownsville Indians,” it is the location of one of British Columbia’s first Indian Reserves.
Polar Island is a landscape marred by colonization, where Indigenous smallpox victims from the south coast were forced into quarantine, substandard care, and burial. Once their peoples were decimated and the land taken, wrangled and exchanged between levels of government the trees were clear-cut for industry, including shipbuilding during the First World War and booming anchorage for local sawmills. From the Poplars is the poetic outcome of archival research and of keeping an ear to the ground – of listening to the stories of an earth scoured by colonization, inequality, and extraction. It is a meditation on an unmarked, twenty-seven and a half acres of land held as government property: a monument to colonial plunder on the waterfront of a city built upon erasures.
From an emplaced poet and resident of New Westminster, this text contributes to present narratives on decolonization. It is an honouring of river and riparian density, and a witness to resilience. It tempers a silence that inevitably will be heard.

parcel bought and sold as the record shows stolen
quarantine and bury there the government
not taking graves into account
warships were built view down a launch ramp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772015720

Cecily Nicholson

Cecily Nicholson is the author of four books, including From the Poplars, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans municipal, artist-run centres, and community-based arts organizing, education, and advocacy. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

Poplar Island pop patri individuated alike

lazaretto

Kamau Taurua, North Brother,

Angel our current

worse conditions of confinement

subjects of capture

property in the strictest sense

bound in a given moment

called to ground

unitary in the midst scattered

breathing

this next while a kind of evolution

stratifying dialects

from a strict sense of words

formal markers for ship makers

soluble paper ever sad

phonetic social generations and forth

demonstration parcels bought and sold repeatedly

as the record shows stolen

light comes up over the southeast bridges

normative, quieted

that a place told you it was bleeding into the snow

cold seeps to bone

born and cut with no language to remember

storage pits, caches, the hanging lots for crows

as land sounds lean into sleet

cottonwood trees

in the dark of winter growing tips see light

causing seedlings to bend toward the source

whiles before people disposed in a hundred-dollar hospital

corporeal lessons lean toward shared logics and finer beats

for the old lamps to show the whips still stuck

after centuries in the old wounds

pages to an opposite shore

to earth beneath here

an I on pavement or other words over

centuries of rotting matter

so sanctuary monoglot accent

island passed back into non-standard

trees suffer catenary curves of ivy and gossamer

signal lines tremble

sway and song put to order; to archive under English cloak

listening horizons burst new density this time

an I wants to pull a part as well

words light rain

romancing words composed upon a bridge

in the smokeless air

from the sky bridge

in the golden dawn pouring over wakening condos

o’r supplanted industry

routes you give in strings and I take as ligaments

called to the surface revolution a minimal surface

the most minimal surface other than the plane

a bloom

a smile curved up into sepals awn-like petals

past the parapet widening to the throat

lingual bone thumbed to spine

riparian causeway to ocean

audible integrity bending moments cable-stayed

dark-eyed juncos

sited earlier at the annual camp

in turn this morning awake to

snow again after a better night’s sleep

warmer and having prepared ample supplies

grease ready to move

us still here sitting awhile

bough-lined yesterday’s divot I was born by the river

just like that river … running ever since. It’s been a long time