Joan Conway is a youth worker in an alternate school in Terrace where’s she’s spent the last seven of the twenty years she’s lived in the northwest. She’s also been writing poetry for many of those years. To expand her boundaries as a writer, she decided to set herself a challenge — to write a series of connected poems.

"I wasn’t sure how they’d be connected or even what they’d be about," she says. "It was a way of developing my craft."

About the same time her sister found a cousin’s family website and discovered a large extended Conway family they knew little about. Joan’s father was in his seventies when he married her much younger mother.

"He died when I was seven and my mother died before I asked any questions," she explained. "We weren’t really looking for my father’s family, but it was uncanny how everything fell into place." A series of coincidences enabled her and her sister to travel to their father’s birthplace in Pont Neuf County, north of Quebec City. This was the place their great great grandfather, Edmund Conway, one of the original pioneers, settled when he came from Ireland in 1825.

Coming home from that extraordinary experience, Joan began to piece together fragments from her extensive journal. When I heard her read some of those poems at last summer’s Bulkley Valley Music Festival’s

spoken word stage, her clarity and integrity as a writer, as well as a human being, shone through.

Ste. Gabriel de Valcartier

There are people who tend
flower gardens, unruly children.
Herman Murphy tends the cemetery
mows and clips the sprawling hillside
tanned and lean, his seventy odd years
unbending in the twinkling blue of eyes.

He tends to our ancestors
riding his lawn mower up and down
gravestones from another century
are lost, shoveled and moved
leaning against the rockery.

He trims the edges, cleans away
the dying back, shriveled flowers
these Irish settlers of the 1800s
a compact display amongst
the spreading French site.
"Soon us English will all be here."
He grins.

This is my first meeting with my father’s people
The Conways open before me
a history book I walk gently,
touch smooth granite surface
outline engravings, sketch pictures.
Each name a whispered breath
each voice ripples
the air, a soft crescendo
in this sleeping hillside
where I press my back against the slate
of my great grandfather, collect
the threads written
on these well tended pages
and listen.


The soft purr of Herman’s lawn mower
smell of newly-cut grass an anchor for searchers
he tends to the graveyard
as a gatekeeper,
protector of this deep
unsuspected opening.

"The whole family opened up for us. People came from the Maritimes and southern Ontario to meet us. It was like having been adopted and coming upon my birth family. Our cousins, who are mostly elderly, brought out photographs of our father, who we’d never seen as a young man. Photographs of us as children we didn’t know our mother had sent them."

It was the photographs that gave Joan a way to move through her journals into poetry. "Working with the photographs became a kind of collaboration."

Finding you
like a deep azure pool
I drink in
these pockets of story
trickle together
spilling into another century.

We visit your mother’s farmhouse
are served tea
out of delicate china cups
this cordial art in your time
the door was always open
so scandalous
to not have slices of cake waiting.

The owner has lived here for seventy years
can still remember my grandmother
dressed all in black
giving her porcelain figurines
from a Salada tea box.

Alone in her garden
where my roots once spread
I gather damp soil between
the rows of beets and potatoes
fill a plastic bread bag
to sprinkle in my own plot.

Further down the dirt road
we pick our way through bushes
your smaller farm stood here
where you cared for your mother
only a depression in the brush
marks this passage.
Yet you left behind photographs
the frames an open window allowing
me to slip inside.

This detail of hillside embellished
with flaming maples
seen through your eyes
where I too might have grown
might have opened
my mouth to the summer rains
in a hay field
a spade in hand
where you opened the earth
and then let her go.

Framed between edges

Irish
Catholic
English

That was the way it was.

Bound within the edge
of your frame.

This picture
a lost moment
easily discarded
as you turn your back
to the camera
but for a glint
protruding out of pocket
sunlight catches a metal flask
medicine we were forbidden to touch.

My cousin whispers
"Some winters he would stay at our house
to get well
my mother was like a sister
but he was a good man."

What lies confined in amber liquid
(I feel I am betraying you)
Did it dissolve your land
transform our cracked walls
distort bean plants spindly
in the earth?
How you planted every inch
of our tiny yard
This declaration to a new beginning
from which you ran out of time.

Joan is continuing to work on the poems and hopes to bring them to completion in a collection. Until then, you can hear some of her other work on Pete Paul’s Spirit of the Raven video released last fall.

(Sheila Peters, who lives outside Smithers, teaches English at Northwest Community College. Her most recent book, Tending the Remnant Damage, was published by BeachHolme last summer.)