Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood

 

Undertaker

No sign, just a smallbrick
building. I ring thedoorbell, a slight
man answers. His hellohas no greeting.
He wears an argylesweater. I say my father’s
name. He gestures and I follow
through the narrow,carpeted hallway
to some hard-backedchairs where I must
wait. His sweaterdisappears around
a corner, and I’m leftfacing a heavy red
curtain—but there’s a gap.Between
curtain and wall, I see awhite-socked
ankle and the grey pantcuff of a man
who’s no longer his body.The undertaker
returns, snaps the curtainclosed, keeping
the living from the dead.He holds out
a small white box with myfather’s name
typed on the label. I needboth hands. I thank him,
then hear my voice ask, Howhot does it get
to bring a body to ash? When hespeaks,
he looks past me. On thedrive home
I try to remember his answer.

Iwas curious to see the full-length poetry debut by Pender Harbour, British Columbia-based poet Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood (St. John’s NL: RiddleFence Publishing, 2024), part of a trio of poetry debuts produced through St.John’s, Newfoundland literary journal Riddle Fence, as it slowly movesto branch out into book publishing. And no, Tia McLennan isn’t, as far as we areaware, any relation to myself, although her family did also emerge fromGlengarry County, her particular line leaving Eastern Ontario long before I did,originally landing that way some fifty or sixty years before my own McLennanlineage made those Lancaster docks. Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a collectioncomposed of small lyric scenes across a tapestry of family moments, writing adream-scape around the loss of her father (my immediate namesake, incidentally).“To think of leaving / as if it were a train station / to move through and weare / always late.” she writes, as part of the poem “Late Letter to Dad.” Thenarratives of her poems are shaped, often shaved down to a single thought, asingle thought-line, such as the short poem “Hungry,” as the first half of suchreads: “Driving around the gravel bend / in Dream Valley and catching / a slimcoyote gliding down / the middle of the road toward / me. I slowed, hoping toget a closer / look at something wild.” The poems are contained as smallmoments or scenes, held together across a soft cadence of sentences andline-breaks. There is an unease through these poems, one intertwined withmemory, loss and grief, all of which are rendered in relation to that dream-scape,whether aside or from deep within. “I have updated your address / and addedyour darkest thoughts to the file.” she writes, to open the poem “Now You HaveFull Access,” “You must fill out the forms / using only spit and moonlight. //If you forget your password, / press your face to the earth in springtime.”