THE COMFORT OF STONE

A volume of poetry focuses on life in Scotland and Canada.

Groundwater was born in Orkney, one of Scotland’s many islands, but immigrated to Ontario as a child. There, her father struggled to support a large family. As an adult, following her father’s death, the author returned to her family’s homeland, once with her mother and another time with her daughter. This collection of poems begins with one such homecoming. Groundwater visits the room above the family bake shop where she was born, marvels at the Ring of Brodgar, and rides the Jacobite Steam Train. Harkening back to her youth in a rented cottage in Ontario, she describes the “smell of bleach on my mother’s kitchen hands / over ripe bananas, vinyl tablecloth / upstairs clean sheets spread / over mattresses stained with summer sweat / and we lay near naked in our beds / under the heat-baked beams.” The poet recalls her grandmother’s handkerchiefs, “fragrant with flowery scent,” and recounts the various pianos her father played during her childhood. “Geese Heard At Night,” a poem organized in V-formation, follows those “dark travellers / across a brimstone moon / phantoms flying / before / the shrouding snow.” The second section of the book takes place at the poet’s newly acquired country house in Essex, Ontario, where she is reminded of the pains and pleasures of rural life. Groundwater’s vivid language leaps off the page in lines like “it seemed the savage wind / could grasp the very mosses / from their crags / and fling them to the foam.” She deftly captures the “rugged beauty of the landscape” of both Scotland and Ontario, painting a clear and breathtaking portrait of her life. The poet’s love for her family is palpable. In “My Father,” she tenderly remembers her dad “smiling at me when I pushed / up under his paper / taking the pens from his pocket / so I could lean against his heart.” Only rarely does a line or an image feel recycled: “Firemen feed the firebox with coal, / the glowing cinder and flame heat / the belly of the boiler.”

A captivating collection of poetry about hearth and home.