The Islands We Carry
Island, Douglas Walbourne-Gough. icehouse poetry, 2024.
Island, the second poetry collection by Douglas Walbourne-Gough, is a book about Newfoundland. It is not a book about the ideal Newfoundland of tourism advertisements or David Hein and Irene Sankoff’s musical Come From Away, nor is it the imagined, historical Newfoundland-that-never-was of a Wayne Johnston novel. Rather, it is Walbourne-Gough’s Newfoundland. It is a different picture of the island than many are used to seeing. It is bumpier — replete with ambivalence, contradictions, and unresolved feelings — and those bumps are what make Island such a worthwhile read.
Island is saturated by a dream-like quality, and Walbourne-Gough mentions this in his acknowledgements:
This book is heavily inspired by dreams. The hopeful, waking sort born out of resisting the histories and realities that try to press and twist us into diminished versions of our true selves, but also the dreams our minds and hearts gift us while we sleep, where we are unconstrained by the physical and the dogmatic.
Some of the dreams shared as poems in Island are vivid, even lucid; others feel uncertain, like they are clouded in a mysterious dream-fog, leaving the reader asking, as Walbourne-Gough does in the title of one poem, “This all happened?.” The storytelling is a real strength in this work, and always, to me, the poems read as stories of the personal — his Newfoundland, bumps and all.
A series of five poems throughout the book, all titled “I Didn’t Just Let This Happen,” share stories from a tortured adolescence where images of traumatic bullying are juxtaposed with minuscule gestures of friendship: “You spit at my feet, I’m thankful it’s not in my face. You / light two cigarettes, hand me one without a word.” These are conflicted scenes from Walbourne-Gough’s Newfoundland, and they remind us how callously a sensitive child’s heart can be treated by the conditions of a life.
The title of these poems, for me, evokes the idea of an eternal return. Paraphrasing Nietzsche: What if one day, someone came to you and said, “you will forevermore relive your life as it has been lived to this point. Every breath, every stumble, every mistake, every triumph, in the same order.” Would you curse this destiny or see it as a blessing of everlasting joy? Trauma and insecurity can be like that — the endless recursion of the past in every subsequent moment. The narrator of Island seems to be replaying these incidents over and over, and the retellings are arresting and difficult. The title itself, repeated as it is throughout the volume, seems like an intervention in trauma’s return — a mantra, perhaps. The narrator reminds themselves they didn’t just let this happen, though it happened many times. Urgent, persistent questions linger for me: How much agency do we have over our context — how much can we control the conditions into which we are born?
My interest in Walbourne-Gough’s work is personal. He and I are both attached in different ways to the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation (QMFN) — he is a status Indian through adoption; I lost status through bureaucracy and geography. Island’s defining complication is the tension between WalbourneGough’s hyphenated identities, the way he experiences his connection to the island through both his Mi’kmaw and settler kinship ties. This internal and familial duality is mirrored within the province as a whole, and nowhere is this more present than in the poem “Newfoundland Standard Time,” which is a screen-captured image from June 2021 when National Indigenous Peoples Day and Discovery Day — the day when Newfoundland’s “discovery” by John Cabot is celebrated — both took place on June 21st.
In juxtaposing these two facets of Newfoundland, Walbourne-Gough shows us how his Newfoundland is strained. But it isn’t just a question of which history ought to be celebrated. Rather, it is a tension lived through in every moment, waking or otherwise. It is the anxiety before going to meet an Elder for the first time:
afraid
to call, to admit that I had no idea who I was,
ashamed of my lack of blood quantum, being
adopted, that I couldn’t yet speak Mi’kmaw."
It is the question “Am I allowed / to wear this?” after receiving a beaded necklace from another Elder. It is downloading a Mi’kmaw language app to “find a way back to language / without someone more Indigenous seeing my shame.” These moments palpate the unique, unnameable emotional landscape that so many of us connected to the QMFN feel so intensely.
And we all have stories like this — moments that we think about repeatedly, as though replaying them in our mind might give us the answer to who we are and where we belong. For my part, I’m often afraid to tell those stories. I’m afraid that they will be read in reductive, essentialist ways — that they might be perceived as an attempt to lodge myself firmly in my subordination or as representing an Indigeneity that isn’t internally fraught, or that I might somehow become a representative of something beyond my own experience or speak over someone else. And I’m afraid, too, of the voices from within that tell me I am not enough. Walbourne-Gough’s narrator gets somewhere I can’t yet reach, but I’m heartened by the path they make: “Not brave, just tired of telling myself / the same story, I spit the phrase not enough into the can, break / into heaves and sobs, let the kettle boil.”
Island ends without giving me the sorts of answers for which I was looking when I first opened the book, but at the end, I do find some solace and some community. When Walbourne-Gough writes “I have to carry these often- / conflicting selves, tend to them both with honesty,” I think he achieves his goal of “Hoping to help anyone else who’s this confused.” I’m still that confused, still afraid, at times still ashamed, but at least I’m not alone in any of this. Walbourne-Gough’s Newfoundland makes mine a little easier to carry.
— Adrian M. Downey teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University
Read this review and many others in Issue 304 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2025). Order the issue now:
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