The House You Were Born In

By Tanya Standish McIntyre || McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022 || Reviewed by Sabyasachi Nag

Tanya Standish McIntyre’s debut collection “The House You Were Born In” (McGill-Queen’s University Press) is addressed to her grandfather, a Quebec farmer forced to foreclose on his farm around 1970 when farmers in America were urged to “get big or get out” and one day, the cows he raised from calf were loaded “on the truck for slaughter” (Confessions of a Farmer, P95). The collection starts with the description of a butterfly “the shattered emerald body…born only a fortnight past”) and we realize the poet is setting up a “memory of a memory” (“Ebony Jewelwing” P3) – orienting the reader to its unique system of encoding, and storage of facts and reflections in flashback.

The opening poem is followed by a description of a house where the walls are “hemmed/by the rustling/calico” (“The House” P4) the sill “scattered with the wire legs of flies” and at a distance “two black willows after the hurricane…arched back in declension.” By now the reader is primed for the time-travel through a series of sketches, vignettes and anecdotes recollecting a place in time that no longer exists, a place that has come to a “full stop/that is not/ death.” (“Ebony Jewelwing” P3)

Much of the collection moves like “the Brown Bear River” or “old maples” just before spring, deliberately weaving synchronous story arcs, touching the narrator and her world in this stand-still place – her mother, grandfather, the house of her childhood. The mother’s character – aloof, loveless and estranged – is portrayed with conflicted tenderness – (“The calendar on the wall/by the phone/will change many times/while the heart sputters to start/like a flooded engine…there is/no happy/ending and how it was all there to see,/in the stiff bend of their arms” “Wedding Pictures”, P6; and resigned empathy “Mother would sit, thinking/…in her silence, I strip bark/from twigs, masts for leaf-boats…under the old black elm, the last of its kind, slowly dying” “Down By The Culvert”, P28; “she would talk, I would listen/ like a younger sister, accepting, taking in/ the studied womanly art never to be/ perfected, of reconciling resignation/ with acceptance, linking back/ to the distant past, looping around/ to present” “Elm and Vine”, P30).

The grandfather’s story starts in triumph – as the keeper and custodian of tradition – (“on our way/up to the woods along the old potato/ field, rolling over the wild-/flowers that would spring back up/ behind us…driving back, we give way to wind/ like a door swung wide/ open” “Red Tractor). The character starts as stoic and optmistic – (“My grandfather sits in the chair by the spice rack/ and I on the table’s edge, feet resting on his knees…the land of marvel/and mystery/…belongs to my grandfather and me” “The Spice Rack” P41). Soon after, we see the first cracks, in his capitulation to economics – high unemployment of the 1970s and prime lending rate above 21% – (“Before or after you sold the cows/ was time’s reference – you were sick/ for days when they loaded them;” Before and After the Cows” P83) – followed by escape and abstention– “The gin never helped/much that I could see – at the kitchen table/they sat and no one left… /until the bottle was out”) “Juniper” P77, and finally to disease and old age “You were/a perfect compass,/ your long arms rising, pointing north…watching the blood/pool even darker, when we know it is hopeless…the primitive urge to walk the earth again as a man, roars up”” “Sacrifice” P86).

In homage to the collection’s title, almost a third is occupied by narratives about the speaker’s house of her childhood. In these poems, the House is the prism and the pivot for speaker’s seeing and sensing of a world seeped in the slow waltz of dying. The point of view is often of an adolescent’s – wondrous, reverential, keen to make sense, yet acutely aware of time and its passing and scared of its sudden stopping: “Not a thing was/kept as it had been, /once, though/the oldest folks could still recall/the wagons and carts…lost/on a shelf no one can reach, a silver plate/photograph in perfect dark and light reveals/the lace-gloved ladies.” “Silver-Plate”, P27. In these passages, time (the lack of it) and place (the ever-changing, impermanence of it) provide key moments of conflict. Informed by a looming sense of ruin and loss, the mood, while not entirely elegiac, is meditative and sombre (“how/strange the way we learn to live/in one body, for as long as something gauges it should last – how strange/…we become heavy” “One Body”  P8.

There are other narratives inhabiting the collection – uncles, grand uncles and grand aunts including the narrator’s father in a brief but telling cameo (“he did love the cars, the music he heard in bars, perhaps the idea of a woman who would set things right – my mother must have tried” “Father was a Miner”, P74) – but they are peripheral, and we see them in passing, as if summoned for a quick family portrait under the house porch, before other compelling events kick in. The main story strands (that of the mother, narrator and the granfather) work in tandem, as a complex, multi-part, multi-form object-correlative to deliver meaning to the speaker’s interrogation about her identity, selfhood and kinship to a place where the speaker in equal measures belongs and is estranged; is present and absent –gathering memories like “a keeper of things forgotten, a vase/for pictures made by words, a riverbed/for the stories you tell” “Story Girl” P 51.

In parts a historical monograph, it is mostly memoiristic –“from the red wagon, I tried to record everything…” and hopeful “from the old spring again we will drink in the light of the sun where grows wintergreen.”  “Wintergreen” P107. Several pieces, while being anecdotal, extend beyond the speaker’s particularity towards a universal memory. And while some of the poems may not stand as firmly on their own, they do stand firmly together, within the complex mosaic of this “House”.

The lyricism derives from language steeped in pastoral ease, openness, unrestraint and spontaneity. The overarching sombre tone is offset by familial warmth, congeniality and zest. While the language soothes the senses, the dramatic line breaks and page breaks add surprise, keeps the reader guessing. A strong debut by a poet to watch.