My Mother Joins the Resistance: Poems by Richard Harrison

I have loved Harrison’s books and he’s an outstanding reader. Hear him if you get a chance. That said I was leery to open this one for two reasons. First? The universal jitters, what if something you looked forward to doesn’t resonate. Second, the collection is largely about his mother’s life, decline and death, and that may hit too close to home in a bad way. Or may be cathartic, in a good way.

Flipping through, I landed on a poem for Michael Dennis that grabs the Adam’s apple and takes a bite:

For Michael Dennis, in Memoriam

The dead gave up everything to get where they are.
Think of them saying, Keep going with your story.

Let it run to its finish, with us 
wishing we knew how it all turned out.

Accept the forgiveness of the dying.
Let your heart lower itself,

and love will gather there the way 
water pools at the foot of a mountain. (p. 36)

When a book has a poem worth the price of admission it tends to allay apprehension. Whatever after is cream.

My Mother Joins the Resistance is broader than her role as his mother, or than her as an individual, or memories. Like Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham is (McClelland & Stewart, 2026), My Mother Joins the Resistance is a deeper introspection than anecdotes, holding close to poetic tradition with eyes to line and phrase, sound and space, significance of details where mostly loss is what remains. Where is the crux of our meaning within the long tapestry of time? Are we to pinch and weave our thread, or let ourselves be dropped and those we love lost with us? She, the titular mother, continues to live in the past, that different country where they do things differently. In the rooms, the stanzas he has collected, her story is part of a tide of immigration, the reconciliation of shards of memory, and an adult’s power to contextualize a person into coherent sense.

There’s the formal movement in many poems. To open it out, wider and significant as a gesture of closing and moving on, such as in “On Gravity,” about being gravid, or pregnant, which closes with “despite all they’d know and never know” (p. 7). Or “spinning life against its end” (“The May Tree, p. 15). It makes a tight seal on a poem to add explicitly the takeaway bow.

There’s a lofty distancing poetic bent, using phrases like “from afar “(p. 11,) “my beloved son” (p. 12), that I don’t recall in earlier works, or maybe I’m more sensitive.

He casually drops intriguing ideas, such as, before we understand words, we understand human language on par with birds, words “comforting and untranslatable as birdsong” (p. 8). Is the uterine-heard understood by the body as well as Mozart or sparrow’s chirp? Do we distinguish our own species? I’m behind in science but it seems to me we recognize particular voices and human language before birth. But that is what good poetry can do, can’t it? Send you off on a tangent of considering, paying attention, researching, responding to not only sound and mood but content.

“Growing up is shutting out childhood./Growing old is letting it return” (p. 8). Is it true childhood matters more the older you get? Certainly some poets seem to revisit formative years forever. There’s something about definitive statement of things that makes me reject a notion. But there’s also something about becoming an orphan, at any age, that can make one want to clamp a fist hard around certainty so it goes no where out of sight. (Is the chafing jealousy since I have little memory of anything before age 19, which is perhaps when my formative years began?)

There’s a lot of heavy emotion in the book, a lot of weighty points of significance and wisdom, such as the pithy adage, “secrets make what you know useless” (“The End of the Town”, p. 16).

There’s a coming to terms with how you can love someone and recognize the harm and violence you couldn’t parse at the time. The book feels like purging and courage, trying to wrap pain into something more palatable to take in, to absorb, rather than let it sit there in a box in the mind’s closet. It is a salve that burns but aids.

Richard Harrison is the winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. Richard’s writings have been published across Canada as well as in the United States, England and Italy. His individual poems, and two books, have been translated into six languages including Spanish, Farsi, French and Arabic. This year he was honoured with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Golden Pen for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Royal University, currently Richard is a full-time poet, essayist, editor and writing mentor in Calgary, where he lives with his wife, Lisa.

Publisher: Wolsak & Wynn Publishers (April 14, 2026)
Paperback 6″ x 9″ | 68 pages
ISBN: 9781998408405

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's latest is Heat Lamp (above/ground press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet