Tonight We Sleep with the Window Open: Poems and Drawings from Belleisle Bay Melanie Craig-Hansford

I sat down to write this review shortly after Summer Solstice. As the sun and the earth begin their slow movement away from the longest day of the year, it seems a fitting moment to turn to a book that begins in winter—

             “Under the frozen bay
              blackness,
              sturgeon retreat to the bottom
              as you tilt away from earth”  Sol Invictus

Tonight We Sleep with the Window Open is a book about living deeply and with an artist’s eye in a small and particular place—Erb’s Cove on the Kingston Peninsula bordering Belleisle Bay, in New Brunswick. The poems and drawings document a journey of healing and re-discovery of self and home: salt air and tides, cedar and ash trees, storms, floods, crows, ferns, deer, people. The poet/artist takes us with her as she finds once more “the last place I felt my authentic self”:

            “This place remembers me…
              …where larch is named tamarack,
              where wet ground and spring nourish wild
               parsnip and fiddleheads…”   This Place Remembers Me

The poems, like the drawings, are cast in the light and shadows of changing months and seasons,

            “Deer tread
              over lady slipper and lupine,
              purple vetch and strangled daisy:
              red in earth         blue in light….
              … slow
              as awaited spring,
              sparse as stone.”  New Brunswick.

The book does not hesitate to grapple with difficulty. Many of us know that healing journeys are not easy or quick. Poems like Whisper affirm that reality.

            “I say the word silence
              like my voice saying the word
               doesn’t negate its meaning….
              ….Out the bedroom window this morning
               yellow birch bow to my brokenness.”

All of us who live in non-urban areas will recognize in poems like Mornings in Erbs Cove our own versions of the difficult realities of life in small, rural communities:

            “There are mornings in Erbs Cove
              when winter isolation rings in my ears,
              the firewood stack is low,
              I’ve not heard the crunch
              of tire or the crow’s lament for days….
              ….the birch disappear
              against the snow”.

What comes through again and again in the book, however is the wide range of restorative possibilities offered by a deep engagement with homeplace. The particularities of landscape, even in its harsher modes, hold the poet and offer her a shape-shifted sense of self across time and space:

            “I am sedimentary…particles and pith…pressure like ice against stone.” (If It Had a Sound);

             “I was sea, a milkweed pod on the cusp,
               wisps of fallen cloud spores
               a wave in an eddy of indigo;
               I was light.”  The Possibilities of Light.

Resilience, models for how to live through and beyond privation, loss, woundedness come from intimate relationship with the natural world and its elements:

              “ To cling is harder than the invention of stone,
                 like the old beard moss that drapes naked
                 branches, mint green against the white winter sky.”  A Longing to Cling

Painting Saint Martins is one of several poems in which the work of the visual artist with image and the poet are clearly one:

              “I gathered smooth stones
                as round as a gull’s eggs
                and hard as last year…
                ….My canvas primed—
                ready to accept their image
                in shades of sand and sky,
                to tell their story
                of tumbling and loss,
                of yesterday’s waves,
                and their reason
                for being stone.”

Intimacy in human relationships is the focus of a second section of the book that grounds the exploration and reclaiming of ancestral home in people (and their ghosted spirits):

            “My mother’s caftan
              was blue and green paisley
              with peacock feathers and emerald leaves….” (As If We Have All the Time in the World);

“…..I remember my grandfather’s smile/ as I entered the porch” (More Than Just Walls);

            “…two tea bags to start,
              six by the end of the day—
              tea as black as molasses.
              as comforting as our last
              scotch…”    (Father)

In the end, in the Epilogue, Aurora returns us all to the elemental and redemptive possibilities of the living world that holds us all:

            “This dawn prays
              itself forward
              after a week of rain…
             Blossoms of columbine
             hold droplets of dew and secrets
             of dogwood, parsley, and lace.”

This is a book to hold and to carry, to pick up and read in hard times and good ones. It is about much more than the complexities of light and shadow in tiny Erb’s Cove, New Brunswick; its tender and honest explorations will resonate in different ways with each of us.

Melanie Craig-Hansford lives in the village of Hampton, New Brunswick. Her paintings and drawings have been featured in gallery exhibits. Her poetry has been published in several journals. She is the co-author of Prayers for Women Who Can’t Pray.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chapel Street Editions (Jan. 3 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 152 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1988299497
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1988299495

Susan Wismer

Susan is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent publications include a collaborative chapbook,Hand Shadowswith Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024). Hag Dancesis coming out with At Bay Press in Spring 2025.www.susanwismer.com