Notes and Images: Redpath Museum (5)

An Archivist of Memory, An Archaeologist of the Soul: on "Girouard Avenue"

What the critics and readers say:

The Matter of Canada

Girouard Avenue is a substantial book, sustained and varied, an eloquent mingling of documentary, personal history and lyrical reflection. Montreal, any city, comes alive in particulars, in stories of who lived and live there, and Stephen Morrissey’s Girouard Avenue brings Montreal, or any other city, to life in this way. Canadians are in some ways scattered in their sense of what made the country, as they are scattered across our geography, and it is important to keep telling and retelling the essential stories, to make the stories part of our literature. Morrissey’s book and his sense of personal responsibility for keeping his past alive is a contribution to this and it is moving because he comes at it from inside, struggling to understand where his people came from, how they suffered, what became of them, what it means in personal, national and human terms. I think sometimes about “The Matter of Canada,” the founding stories that belong in this shared narrative, and Girouard Avenue shows clearly that the Irish in Montreal are part of it. I admire this book because it engages with and honours in a sustained and varied way, in poetry, a body of material that is personal yet also shared, part of our history. One wearies of occasional lyrics arising with little or no context beyond the immediate.

Jean Mallinson, Ph.D., lives in West Vancouver, B.C.; she has written numerous articles on writers like Margaret Atwood and P.K. Page, for Geist, Canadian Literature, and other periodicals. She has published two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, Terra Infirma - A Life Unbalanced, about the author’s struggle to reclaim her life after experiencing a toxic response to the antibiotic drug, gentamicin.

An Archivist of Memory and Archaeologist of the Soul

Girouard Avenue is a kind of temporal mosaic spanning many decades, and these recollections evoke a variety of emotional hues within the poet’s life, the lives of his family, the lives of his Irish ancestors, and the life of Montreal itself. The book comes across like "a Joseph Cornell box," a "strange puzzle of events" and circumstances ranging from the melancholy of dreary November afternoons to such droll oddities as "Beats All Creation, the New CPR Station." I relished re-experiencing the candles, canes, crutches, and other accoutrements of the St. Joseph Oratory. In Morrissey’s role as an "archivist of memory and archeologist of the soul," he has uncovered much of the other-worldly in the ordinary, the universal in the personal, and the timelessness in time. The main message is that I really appreciate this moving and enjoyable poetic "archive."

David Diefendorf lives in Burlington, Vermont after living many years in New York City; he is a writer, visual artist, and poet.

On Girouard Avenue

Once I sat down with Girouard Avenue, I had difficulty putting it down until I had read its entirety. That, for me, is quite remarkable for a book of poems because my usual practice is to read some pages, or perhaps a section, and then put the book aside for a later continuation. Stephen Morrissey’s Girouard Avenue is a very compelling book of poems—a deeply personal family history that is so inextricably interwoven with the history of our country, but a history that never loses sight of the personal, how history shapes the individual, how it shapes us all. This is a wonderful volume that pays deeply felt homage to Morrissey’s ancestral past while at the same time telling us so much about the poet and about us as a nation. The coming together of the poetic sequences is quite successful and each section seems to add a new layer of meaning to the overall work, a new way of seeing. In short, this is a very fine accomplishment and I think it represents Morrissey’s best work that I've read.

Glen Sorestad is the author of over eighteen collections of poetry including Road Apples, An Autumn Journey into America (Rubicon Press, 2009) ; he was Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan from 2000-2004 and he is a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. Glen Sorestad was awarded an Order of Canada in 2010. He co-founded Thistledown Press.

Laurence Hutchman on Girouard Avenue

In Girouard Avenue, Stephen Morrissey has mapped out in time and place his own neighbourhood, as well as that of Montreal. The poet accurately portrays the individual ties he has to his brother, mother, grandmother, and aunts. He expresses a central sense of loss, as well as a recuperation of the essential qualities of his father. In elegiac poems, he defines these relationships through appropriate language, original imagery and strongly felt lines. Beyond his immediate family, Morrissey explores the lives of his ancestors, going back to Mary Callaghan, his great-grandmother; Father Martin Callaghan, the first Montreal-born pastor of Saint Patrick’s Church; and Thomas Morrissey, a brass finisher—setting them in a larger historical context. In the final section, Morrissey expresses the tragedy of the Irish who died in the sheds of Griffintown in the 1840s, yet moves beyond it to a personal celebration of those who survived and helped build Montreal.

Laurence Hutchman, Ph.D. is the author of Reading the Water (Black Moss, 2008) and eight other volumes of poetry; he is a Professor of English at the University of Moncton, Edmundston, New Brunswick.

Claudia Lapp on Girouard Avenue

Girouard Avenue is a Chironic collection—dealing with grief & sorrow, sharing it, moving it to a wider, transpersonal perspective. Stephen Morrissey has given us, and his ancestors, a gift of healing. I walked along with him and his brother, in the snowy streets of NDG. “The Colours of the Irish Flag” at the end is just right.

Claudia Lapp is the author of several books, including Water and Fire (Dakini, 1998); she is one of the original seven Vehicule Poets. She lives in Eugene, Oregon where she writes poetry and practices astrology.

On Girouard Avenue by John McAuley

Girouard Avenue by Stephen Morrissey is a well crafted mix of open form narrative and lyric about "the intricacies/of blood and life,"deeply felt and, for the poet, a restorative work.

At the heart of the book are three serial poems on the Montreal of Morrissey's childhood and coming of age, on his extended family, and in particular on coping with the devastating loss of his father, who died when Morrissey was six. The fourth serial poem is an elegiac account of his multi-generational links to Irish history.

Beyond family lore, photographs, a passage from his father's diary, and a young Morrissey's own striving "to file away"his memories and early creative work, much of the poetry arises from his own dreams as an adult, and Morrissey alludes to their psychic reality and transformative power. While Girouard Avenue doesn't contain any overtly religious poetry, Morrissey insists that love and compassion form the only pathway to a better world.

Girouard Avenue is an important book that will resonate with those who have more than a passing connection to this city and to their troubled ghosts.

John McAuley--one of the original Vehicule Poets--teaches in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal. He is working on a manuscript of new poems.

Aileen Collins on Girouard Avenue

I read the poems with great pleasure—you evoke the time and place with great skill, and give the reader an insider’s view of a particular area of Montreal. When we were kids, my father has a cousin—Miss Sadie Gleason, who lived on Harvard Ave., just below Sherbrooke. Our family used to visit her on special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays. Her home, a lower duplex flat, was very much like the ones you describe.

Aileen Collins co-founded DC Books with her husband Louis Dudek.

Maxianne Berger on N.D.G.

Although not Irish, several generations of my extended family lived in N.D.G. .. my mother grew up on Marlowe Avenue, next door to her grandparents .. my maternal grandmother lived on Sherbrooke West, with her aunt and her aunt's blended family .. Stephen Morrissey mentions the Collins Funeral Home .. that's where my grandparents were married as that was the family residence before Great Aunt Saidye moved to Oxford Avenue .. and Girouard is where my parents sent me to acting classes with The Children's Theatre .. and some music store on Sherbrooke where I endured accordion lessons on an instrument that dwarfed me. I was on the swim team at the NDG community centre .. belonged to the library there .. went to after school games there in the gymnasium .. wood burning, puppetry.. you name it, I did it! So this book, Girouard Avenue, brought all these memories back .. as for me, we lived on Vendôme

Maxianne Berger is a Montreal poet. Her most recent book is Dismantled Secrets (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008).

Noni Howard on Girouard Avenue

Stephen Morrissey's Girouard Avenue is deeply moving. It is not my story but one around mine and close enough to feel. It is full of angst and childhood loneliness, and isolation that only the people of Quebec intuitively know. Morrissey has told their story and that of his own people well. Girouard Avenue opened an old wound and I bled, with Morrissey and for him; revisiting my past in Quebec is beyond tears and I'm glad that Morrissey has made other people aware of what it's really like to be from there.

Noni Howard, Ph.D., was born in Quebec's Eastern Townships and earned her B.A. from Bishops University; she has lived in California for many years. Howard is a poet, author, and publisher; she is also the recipient of many awards, and has been a producer of poetry festivals. A book of her short stories is forthcoming.

Mat Donnelly on Girouard Avenue

Girouard Avenue gives a great record of the history and to the lives and times lived. A bitter and sweet pill to swallow for sure. But the dignity and deeper view of seeing things pass that you take seems a fitting prescription. Mat Donnelly is a writer and film and new media director, who lives in NDG, right on Girouard Avenue.

Girouard Avenue to Ogden Street

I have often wondered what qualities make the best writers? The best poets? Honesty is a huge one—a huge plus especially I would think in the area of poetry. One idea/image/thought comes to mind with the poetry that I have enjoyed and loved over the years—this is the notion that the author takes you by the hand and guides you, but not forcefully at all, and says "Look, please look at the things that are important to me. Please look at what I have or maybe even haven't learned. This is me, this is my life. These are the things that are HOLY to me." I do not use the word "HOLY" lightly here. I would think that in every soul who has tried to lead an "examined" life to some degree, that you, me, all of us, have these "mind movies" of things we have done, people we have known, thoughts we have had, even moods that grabbed hold of us that are HOLY to us. Girouard Avenue by Stephen Morrissey is a HOLY book. " Ogden Street" is where I spent the first twenty years of my life. Reading Stephen's work has brought so much back to me that was already there and put it in a glorious new light, and at times a breathtakingly melancholy and wistful light. History, family, ancestors, the spirit of place, and the legacy that one generation leaves to the next, all expressed beautifully in Girouard Avenue from Coracle Press by Stephen Morrissey!

Devin Allred writes a blog, myfavoritemonsters, out of Phoenix, Arizona. He is an avid reader of literature, poetry, and books on the paranormal.

On Girouard Avenue

The poetry of Stephen Morrissey is sophisticated, subtle, remarkably appealing and readable to a wide audience. He has developed his narrative style with great dexterity and pleasurable insight. The reader is drawn into his world of historical memento and unexpected spirituality. Every poem is finely crafted and the imagery is unusual whether it be a brief description of a location in his beloved Montreal or a somber reflective moment. The influence of his late father is both haunting and revelatory. Morrissey is truly one of Canada's great poets and we recommend that you set aside a few autumn evenings (or whatever time of year you prefer) to read about his specialized environment and thus learn more about your own.

Eric and Arlene Maass have been teaching at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois for a combined 25 years. Eric received his B.A. in Jewish Studies from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and a Th.M. in historical theology from Dallas Theological Seminary. He also studied for several years at DePaul University in Chicago and worked on a project concerning postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida. Arlene is a graduate of Trinity University in Deerfield, Illonois and holds a Master's degree in Religious Studies.

Bruce Whiteman: Another Family Album

Morrissey is a romantic poet. “Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet,” he has said. One hears Keats and Coleridge in such a contention, but also Jung and other depth psychologists who prefer to speak about the collective unconscious rather than the more personal subconscious theorized by Freud. Morrissey’s poetics as reified in that statement suggest that the poet is a medium for something larger, some voice that is not just the private voice of opinion and experience but a voice from a much deeper level. His earlier work bears this out. There is an imagistic and musical liveliness in the older poems chosen for Mapping the Soul that is very attractive. The poems seem to look out on the world with an avidity and an openness that Morrissey has lost as he has gradually focused more and more on his personal life and eventually his forebears. Love was his intervening compulsion, and the poetry of his 1990s trilogy “The Shadow” (with its Jungian admissions) moved from the larger world to private experience in a relationship that clearly helped to rescue him from certain psychic wounds.

Bruce Whiteman lives in Los Angeles, where he is the head of UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. His review of Girouard Avenue, from which this is taken, was published by Poetry Quebec in January 2010.

On Girouard Avenue

Stephen Morrissey takes us through a personal journey of childhood memories that evolve into deep reflections about life, death, love, the experience of Irish immigrants and a guided visit to Montreal in the early 1900s in his poetry collection Girouard Avenue from Coracle Press. Morrissey, a sixth-generation Irish-Montrealer, recalls fond memories of times spent at his grandmother’s flat on the titular street. You sense his deep attachment to his grandmother in his rhymes. It is possibly her who Morrissey refers to when he writes, “the centre...the woman who makes the family whole.” Morrissey calls poetry “the voice of the soul,” but his work sounds more like a scream asking for the memories to dwell, to remain against the passing of time. Morrissey writes, “keeping an accurate record against time […] I became an archivist of memory, an archaeologist of the soul.” Girouard Avenue uses beautiful and descriptive language, taking us to familiar places but in different times. It evokes a finitude of life’s moments that yearn to be preserved. --

Oksana Cueva writes for The Link, Concordia University’s student newspaper, where a longer version of this review was published on January 19, 2010.

Review of Stephen Morrissey’s Girouard Avenue

The Girouard Avenue that Stephen Morrissey offers us is no mundane stretch of pavement and cold-water flats under a pale sky. It spans an ocean and centuries, reflecting the inner heart attuned to a deeper ancestral pulse… Here we find a poet-historian with a fine sense of detail… Morrissey has fulfilled the task he set for himself. He has traced the uprootedness of his ancestors and the chasm of loss. He has dredged up that great stone and inscribed it in commemoration. I look forward to the new poems waiting in the wings, exuberant, testing the winds.

--Jody Freeman is a translator; this excerpt if from her review of Girouard Avenue in Montreal Serai, volume 23, issue 1, March 2010.

Review of Girouard Avenue in Nuacht

Opening with “Prologue: Holy Well,” this book drew me in and held my attention until “Epilogue: The Colours of the Irish Flag.” “Girouard Avenue Flat,” the first poem, manages to capture what life was like for an Irish immigrant family who had lived in Montreal for over a century. We are introduced to Morrissey’s grandmother (the matriarch of the family), his great-aunts, and other relatives. “Hoolahan’s Flats, Oxford Avenue” describes what it was like to grow up in NDG in the 1950s. “November,” the third and most moving of the poems, focuses on death and funerals… “The Rock, Or A Short History of the Irish in Montreal” is a memorial to victims of the 1847 Irish Famine and a tribute to those who helped them. I encourage you to read Girouard Avenue. You won’t be disappointed.

--Reviewed for Nuacht, the newsletter of the St. Patrick's Society of Montreal, in May 2010, by Anne Forrest.

Allan Brown's review of Girouard Avenue

Stephen Morrissey's apparently casual but fully controlled narrative skills are evident throughout the four-part Girouard Avenue (Coracle Press). He explores his childhood memories, his Irish ancestry, and present-day Montreal. We accompany him up, down and across the streets, aware of "the sound / of time's slow movement"("Girouard Avenue Flat"), until place becomes people, revealing "who we are / and what we've become"("The Rock"), and revealing also the poet himself, both intensely personal and precisely observant, "an archivist of memory, / an archaelogist of the soul" ("Hoolahan's Flat, Oxford Avenue").

--This review appeared in Jones Av., issue XV/I, summer 2010. Allan Brown's poetry has been published in various Canadian forums since 1962. His twenty-first collection, a sequence entitled Excursions, was recently published by The Alfred Gustav Press in North Vancouver, BC.

Cynthia Coristine on Girouard Avenue

For anyone who has lived in Montreal - especially been a child in Montreal (and in my case, with an Irish background as you know), your book is incredibly moving... the vignettes of your relatives, preserved for posterity, the dull ache of your childhood, watching your Dad drive away to his death in Boston.... November in Montreal is like November in no other place - that's something you don't forget no matter how many years you've been away. That theme from Take 30 (?) that you always put on when you got home from school (Dave Brubeck's Take Five I later found out - so quintessentially Canadian even though he isn't).

--Cynthia Coristine, who lives in Ottawa, is the family historian for Montreal's Coristine family.

Morrissey's "Girouard Avenue" is available at these fine bookstores:

The Word Book Store
469 Milton
Montreal, QC
H2X 1W3

Ph: 514-845-5640

Paragraphe Book Store
2220 McGill College Avenue
Montreal, QC
H3A 3P9

Ph: 514-845-5811
http://www.paragraphbooks.com/

Encore Book Store
5670 Sherbrooke Street West,
Montreal, Qc

Ph: 514-482-5100
http://www.encorebooks.ca/

Argo Book Store
1915 Ste Catherine W.
Montreal, Quebec

Ph: 514-931-3442
http://www.argobookshop.ca/

Also, at the book store in the lobby at St. Mary's Hospital, Montreal.

Order directly from Coracle Press:

http://www.coraclepress.com/
E-Mail: info@coraclepress.com

Notes and Images

Monday, November 28, 2011

Redpath Museum (5)

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