Okanagan Odyssey by Don Gayton

Rocky Mountain Books, 2010

In Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir & Culture, ecologist Don Gayton swirls the valley around like a glass of, say, Gamay Noir, then scrutinizes its legs—from its graphic glacial origins through to beneficial First Nations wildfire management, gold-spawned ranch culture and finally his own instinctive pruning for this year’s grapes—before he sits back for a long, lingering sip. (My awkwardly-extended metaphor, not his.) A Summerland resident of several years, Gayton is “frustrated by the agonizingly slow growth of [his] local knowledge” and so becomes his own gregarious protagonist, meandering alongside astronomers, restorative biologists, lepidopterists, grape-growers and landscape painters from Osoyoos to Armstrong via the Chopaka grassland, White Lake, Black Knight Mountain and a dozen other hilltops and valley bottoms, providing so many resonant details and insights that my copy of Odyssey was gloriously dog-eared after one reading. To experience the Okanagan terroir even more fully, he equips himself every few chapters for a tripling (ambitious book clubs take note!) of local wine, food and literature, eg. a Naramata Pinot Gris, artisan bread and cheese, Ambrosia apples and Harold Rhenisch’s sun-dappled Out of the Interior. Even as it enlightens—the valley’s largest block of Class 1 grape land, for example, has been paved beneath Kelowna—Gayton’s prose entertains. “If under current conditions the two Canadian fingers [of the mostly-American Great Basin biome] were to push any farther northward, they would suffer frostbite.” Drinking Côtes du Rhône beside a campfire: ‘“It’s like a long, beautiful explosion in my mouth,” I said. My friend replied, “I used to know a girl like that.”’ By book’s end Gayton has “put flesh on my valley,” our valley, through science writing that is poetic, wise and—perhaps most importantly—accessible.

Adam Lewis Schroeder

Lyric Ecology by Mark Dickinson & Claire Goulet

Cormorant Books: Toronto, 2010

Jan Zwicky is one of Canada’s “most innovative yet unsung intellectual figures” according to the editors of this collection of essays about her work as a poet, philosopher and musician. Mark Dickinson and Clare Goulet set out to rectify this neglect of her ideas and writing, which includes seven poetry collections and two philosophical works, Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom and Metaphor (2003). The book’s offerings are eclectic, ranging from a personal account by Christopher Wiseman, who remembers Zwicky as a “passionate bright-eyed” teenaged prodigy in his first creative writing class at the University of Calgary, to Goulet’s reflections on Zwicky’s use of the dash as a typographic mark. Several contributors consider Zwicky’s notions of lyric and metaphor, including Montreal writer Darren Bifford, whose essay, “Metaphor and Ecological Responsibility,” notes Zwicky’s insistence that thinking about the world requires being attentive to its specificity. “Poetry is important for the cultivation of ecological responsibility because metaphor enables ontological insight,” Bifford writes. “We are enabled to see and hear more clearly actual relationships that inhere in the world because of the kind of thinking that metaphor engenders. Comprehending a metaphor may have bearing on both our knowledge of the world and our practical actions in the world.” But Halifax poet Brian Bartlett cautions against over-emphasizing Zwicky’s use of metaphor, noting her facility with other poetic tools and perceptual modes. “In its blending of surprises and its concert of effects, poetry is a place where the extraordinary might be found anywhere.” There’s much in this collection to provoke thought, including Toronto writer Dennis Lee’s analysis of the structural logic of Lyric Philosophy and a conversation between Zwicky and Victoria-based poet Tim Lilburn. But most pleasing is the sparkling clarity of Zwicky’s thought, a motif that recurs through the layered polyphony of Lyric Ecology.

Portia Priegert