As a poet, I always felt embarrassed about writing about my children.  It seemed self-indulgent and I feared being sentimental.  But then what could be more poetic than one’s children?  To not see poetry in their being bespeaks a terrible lack.  In Gifts: Poems for Parents, editor and poet Rhea Tregebov, addresses that lack with a slim but powerful selection of poems about children written by contemporary Canadian poet-parents.  “I think that as a poet, I began writing about being a parent not so much to correct misapprehensions or to vindicate my choices as to excavate my own terrors and pleasures.” Tregebov says in her introduction to Gifts.   The “terrors” and “pleasures” of parenthood are on full display here wrought in finely crafted poems by the likes of such poet parents as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Rhea Tregebov herself.  There are poems of fear — night terrors, noises outside, wolves and monsters; and there are poems of wonder and awe; and poems, too, of frustration and anxiety.  If I were to be asked the question of who I was as a parent, I would like to answer the way John Steffler does in his poem “Hollis Street, Halifax” where

those with children at the ends

of their arms, [are] small versions of themselves brightly

inflating as they drain down,

as though they’d opened a vein in their wrists and

out poured blood taking the shape of a child

pulling them by the hand:

Parents are those, the poet says,”going invisible, sucked up the straws/of six year old arms, diving/inside small skins,/starting over again, small.”  That starting over again, the re-seeing that comes with being a parent is something that Gifts attempts to bring to the reader.  Look Mommy, Tregebov seems to say with this collection, poems especially for you.

Today’s Poetry Friday host is The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Winter can pack a wallop where I live in Canada.  Because it can be so severe, stories are often about survival.  The people who immigrate here learn to adjust to winter in often unique ways that contain traces of their origins and yet orient them to this climate.  In Thor, by W.D. Valgardson (illus. Ange Zhang,) we see an Icelandic Canadian boy go out with his grandfather who is a fisherman on Lake Winnipeg, to fetch fish from his nets.  It is the dead of winter.  “The snow was at the top of the fences, as high as the windows.  The snow was so cold it crunched under their feet like dried bread under Grandmother’s rolling pin.  Their breath made white clouds.”  Thor must wear two sets of clothing and a bushy, fur-lined hat with earflaps before they set out in his grandfather’s Bombardier.  While outside, Thor and his grandfather notice some snowmobilers driving recklessly over thin ice.  One of them falls in.  It is up to Thor to to rescue him.  Will he be able to do it?

In The Big Storm by Rhea Tregebov (illus. Maryann Kovalski,) we meet a Jewish girl named Jeanette and her cat, Kitty Doyle.   It is winter in north end Winnipeg.  On the day of a snow storm, Jeanette forgets about Kitty Doyle who comes to pick her up from school every day.  After school, Jeanette plays in the snow and goes over to her friend Polly’s for latkes.  At Polly’s, she suddenly remembers that Kitty has been waiting for her all this time.   She hurries out only to find Kitty huddled under the snow in an alleyway.  Is Jeanette too late?  Will Kitty Doyle survive?

Thor and The Big Storm are stories about winter where I live.   What about where you live?  What is winter like for you and your children?