I recently picked up Bren Simmers’ newest book The Work (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Having read snippets of Simmers’ poetry before, I wanted more. So, I took it as a sign when her latest collection was available at my local library, a mini-miracle in my experience of searching the stacks for work by Canadian poets.
On the simple front cover, all vowels are erased, giving an immediate sense of disconnection, absence, and loss before you open the first page. Brilliant.
Inside, Simmers expands on these themes through poems that centre family loss and grief. But she also flips the narrative to remind us how deep our connections remain. Her crystal-clear images do so much work as she shifts form and tone throughout the collection.
The section entitled Still Mom (with poems for which Simmers won the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize) also includes erasure poems similar to the cover. A powerful device, and for me the missing letters feel like a secret language to fellow travelers in the land of the disappearing. I’m attempting to tackle similar themes of loss surrounding my mother’s dementia and have never seen the issue so deftly handled. It blew me away.
my m ther’s sweater
can’t bear t wash r wear it
since draped ver the back
f a chair a reminder f
her perfect stitches that nce
mended my h les
The Work addresses other losses: a father’s death, a sister-in-law’s cancer, the slow demise of the earth. Simmers’ gaze remains laser-focused and rivetingly honest throughout. Amongst the grief, she writes of small moments of grace which include dancing with her mother in a shoe store, and carrying the weight of her father’s death which she explores in the final poem.
A cumulous cloud, one-kilometre-long and tall
weighs as much as a herd of 100 elephants.
All those water particles held aloft by air,
I didn’t know that all this noticing
was love. Breathing in and out.
One day we’re here, the next, clouds.
It’s a tough job, all this caring for, and about, each other. Thankfully, Simmers has shared with us so much of her own deft and beautiful work in this book. I am deeply grateful for her toil.
— Lynn Easton writes from Maple Ridge, BC on unceded q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie) territory. Her work appears in periodicals and anthologies including Sustenance (Anvil Press), Boobs (Caitlin Press), and The Malahat Review where her essay “The Equation” received the Constance Rooke Prize. She writes about her mother to remember for them both.
You can read Lynn Easton's story "Vanishing Point" in Issue 303 (Spring 2025). Order the issue now:
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