Bookworm, no. 61
Kayla Penteliuk reviews Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s “Our Green Heart.” Alexandra Lukawski reviews Lesley Crewe’s “Death & Other Inconveniences.” Poetry by Michael Goodfellow. Inside the October issue.
Savour Me Timbers
Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests
Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Penguin Random House Canada
216 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
Born in Ireland and orphaned at a young age, Diana Beresford-Kroeger was schooled in the Lisheens Valley, near the southern tip of the country, where an older generation of subsistence farmers taught her Druidic knowledge rooted in Celtic culture. “I received an education that was wholly unique,” she writes, based on “the distillation of three thousand years of wisdom.” Now an accomplished botanist and biochemist living outside of Ottawa, she shares this “ancient inheritance” in Our Green Heart.
In 2019, Beresford-Kroeger detailed her upbringing in To Speak for the Trees. Similar in its captivating tone, her latest book consists of essays about nature, spirituality, and climate change. She dances artfully between scientific and poetic language: “Trees produce antimicrobials called phytoalexins to fight infection. Trees listen.” In “Forest Bathing,” her engrossing storytelling ability shines. “Step into an ancient forest and go slowly,” she urges. “Stand still. Stand tall. And feel the exchange of consciousness.” As she describes her own experience, she moves through the five senses to articulate the union between body and nature. One can almost smell the damp moss, taste the delicious air, and touch the abundant leaves. Our forests are crucial to the world’s ecosystems, she argues, and protecting them benefits everyone.
“Outside our bodies, there is another pulse that keeps us alive,” Beresford-Kroeger writes in her introduction. “The trees of the forest offer oxygen and our lungs receive it. In and out, back and forth, beat, beat, beat, we are made and remade from the breath of trees, with sprinkles of stardust.” To sustain this pulse, she presents the global Bioplan: one tree planted per person per year for the next six years. Tackling climate change is manageable, she insists, if we pause to see the forest for the trees.
—Kayla Penteliuk
Oh, Margo…
Death & Other Inconveniences
Lesley Crewe
Vagrant Press
280 pages, softcover
Lesley Crewe begins her novel Death & Other Inconveniences with a recent widow recalling her husband’s lethal habits: “How many times had Margo told Dick to stop wolfing his food?” As a woman who found thinking “upsetting and totally unnecessary,” she has always relied on others, most recently her departed spouse. Now she’s unsure what to do about anything and faces her biggest challenges yet: a mountain of debt, a finicky TV remote, and Dick’s first wife, who considers her a “man-eater.”
Crewe introduces a host of characters who dictate Margo’s life. Her previous husband, Monty, happily remarried, acts as her “voice of reason.” Her perfectionist daughter, Julia, criticizes her abysmal financial planning and extravagant cosmetics collection. Mike, her calmer child, stands up for her but often concedes to the more outspoken relatives. Lastly, her older brother and sister, Hazen and Eunie, always give it to her straight: “You should’ve had more sense than to marry a gambler.” All of them—including her siblings’ two pet donkeys—believe Margo is hopeless. Will she ever learn how to work that remote?
At the start, almost everyone is unlikeable, but they redeem themselves by the end. When Julia learns that Margo wears makeup because it masks her insecurities, she realizes “that she’d been unfair to her mother” and becomes more sensitive. Thanks to her daughter’s new-found kindness, Margo grows indifferent toward her former obsession: “It costs money to look young. Ask anyone who lives in L.A.” A novel that centres on maturing later in life, after a loved one’s death, may sound depressing. Yet with wit and candour, Crewe finds the funny within the turmoil.
—Alexandra Lukawski
Poet’s Corner
Ditch Daffodil
Pale, double petalled,
you picked it from the overgrowth,
image of itself, heirloomed,
mouthing a past tense
Spring snow, you woke in the dark,
light outside white and wet black
like stones underwater,
ice a polish
that took one wear,
each bloom opened
into a kind of skylight
—Michael Goodfellow is the author of, most recently, Folklore of Lunenburg County. Find more of his work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the October Issue
“Witch hunts eventually peter out.” The senator Yuen Pau Woo on the foreign interference frenzy.
Paul W. Bennett reviews Alec Bruce’s The Cooperators: The People Behind the Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement, 1949–2024.
“Her life was both fascinating and wildly unconventional.” Michael Taube reviews Enid Mallory’s Irrepressible: Yukon’s Martha Black—From Gold Rush to Parliament Hill.
And much more!