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Donna Langevin’s A Story for Sadie demonstrates great empathy and compassion for Sadie, the grandmother she never met. Sadie was incarcerated in a Montreal insane asylum following death of her infant son, decades before Donna Langevin was born. In a hybrid narrative consisting of persona poems in Sadie’s voice, dialogues with her mother and brother about Sadie, Sadie’s desperate letters to her husband and children, whom she never saw again after being committed, and poems in her own voice, Donna Langevin seeks to understand the connections she has with Sadie. Some of those connections were forced upon her by her father—Sadie’s surviving son—who feared his hippie, poet daughter Donna was “strange,” like the Mother who had been sent away during his early years after the death of his baby brother.

There are many powerful poems in the book in Sadie’s voice as she grieves her lost child and yearns to see her husband and children while struggling with loneliness in the asylum. In the second section there are also poems in the author’s voice as she tries to understand and forgive her father for a lifetime of scapegoating and cruel criticism because he decided she was just like the Mother he lost when she was incarcerated in the asylum.

Among the strongest poems are those which reference the “Pectus Excavatum”—a physical malformation which author Donna Langevin shares with her abusive father. The book has its own narrative arc and Langevin’s extensive playwriting experience is obvious as some key characters such as an early 20^th century journalist and the Quebecois poet Emile Nelligan, also at the asylum during some of Sadie’s incarceration, teach us more about Sadie as she interacts with them.

Among the many vivid and imaginative poems in the collection is “Rockathon—May 1923”, in which Sadie, dressed in a “salopette”—the inmates’ work overall—attempts to soothe herself by swaying in a rocker in the patients’ rec room, “I rock, eyes closed / back and forth, back and forth, / until I’m asleep in my cradle. / My parents’ …smiles beaming down on me.” Sadie imagines galloping on her rocking horse and riding waves of pleasure in bed with her husband. Sadly, her parents would neither visit her, nor sign papers for her release. Her husband Dick was turned away from the asylum because he was drunk.

In the poem “Pictures,” an edgy and brave interrogation of religious pictures in the Catholic church-run asylum, Sadie observes that in the dining hall, Christ “takes away our appetite / as he blesses his Last Supper.” The “Good Shepherd holds / his raw heart in his hands / as if nothing could heal it, or save / those…waiting…for their next lightning bolt” –is a reference to electric shock treatments. But the painting which “pierces holes” in Sadie’s side is of children climbing into Christ’s lap…the way Sadie’s “lost little ones / once looked at [her].”

In the poignant short poem “Donald” in the series “Behind My Closed Eyelids” about Sadie’s son—the author’s father—Sadie recalls his “dark almond-shaped eyes / and buttercup hair,” that he was “well-made”… “except for the indented rib cage / that never detached from his spine.”

“I love you just as you are;” Sadie recalls telling her toddler son Donald with the hole in his chest; “We call it his treasure chest.”

Depression steals Sadie’s resilience as her incarceration at the asylum without family visitors drags on. In the very evocative poem “Tattered,” Sadie imagines that “The moths have eaten holes in [her] skin.” She searches her mother’s sewing basket for “dream-skeins.” She finds her darning needle “with an eye wide enough to see [her].” She cries, “Help me… / The wind whistles through my skin.”

The doctor tells her that shock treatments could alleviate her depression, but they separate her from herself. In “Aftershock,” Sadie is a “white cloud shrouding [her] … floating…who?” She is “weightless,” “drifting” with “no me story,” asking “What’s my forgotten name?”

In the clever piece, “The Poet,” the artfully imagined conversation between Quebecois poet Emile Nelligan and Sadie shows her observing him as he argues with someone she can’t see and then reading from his work:

“Snow inside my dark soul, / All my hopes are frozen…” Nelligan reads. Sadie shivers with her own grief, but engages with Nelligan, “Your words will live on forever. / They’re like snowflakes that never melt,” she tells him. This exchange between Sadie and Nelligan allows author Donna Langevin to reference herself as the poet creating the narrative of Sadie’s story.

Sadie passes her journal to a fellow inmate, the newspaperman Jean Charles Page, whom she befriends after he is committed to the asylum because of his alcoholism. He promises to tell the world about her unfair incarceration. After being released, Page joins the military to fight overseas in World War II. Sadie is never sure whether he will be able to keep his promise. However, we as readers understand that her granddaughter, the author Donna Langevin, has taken on the mission of telling Sadie’s story so it won’t be lost.

The birth announcement of Donna shared at the end of Part 1 is an effective way to connect Sadie and the granddaughter who has written her story. It is also a clever segue to the section of the book which includes poems in Donna Langevin’s voice and dialogues about Sadie between the author, her mother and brother.

In poems written from the point of view of her child-self Donna Langevin describes wondering at a young age about her paternal grandmother Sadie, and realising the mystery surrounding her life and death. In the poem “Seven” she is proud of learning to print, but focused on writing her unknown grandmother’s name “on a mud-pie”, or tracing it “with an icicle / or tramp[ing] it out in the snow…for all the stars to see.”

In the poem “Odd Number” we witness some of the nasty criticism of Donna Langevin by the author’s father:

my father says

my teeth are yellow

and I dress like

a haystack tied in the middle.

In the poem “The List” the father warns the author that, “When children grow older / their parents no longer love them / just because.”

In the poem “Dry” the author tells us that after her father died “you could squeeze my stone heart / and not a drop would ooze out.” She could not muster any grief for her father:

You could fling me into an ocean of tears,

I’d be a pillar of salt”

Yet, Donna Langevin keeps photos of her father. In the insightful and beautifully crafted poem, “Photograph of My Father with His Mother” Langevin demonstrates characteristic empathy as she describes her father sitting in Sadie’s lap: “He is almost five, golden / and laughing”. And in the next stanza:

My father will have a mother two more years.

After she’s locked away in the hospital,

his hair and face will darken.

In a boarding school,

he will win scholarships in math,

turn sharp as a needle

inside the compass of himself.

But as the book’s title and our journey through the narrative tell us, Donna Langevin’s strongest commitment is to Sadie—the grandmother she never met whom her father compared her to in order to project his grief, his fury and his fear.  

In the final poem of the collection Langevin displays a recently acquired photo of Sadie and introduces her to one of her sons. She thanks Sadie for her “flesh and bones” and those of the sons she loves. She believes the best way to appreciate her grandmother Sadie is to keep her image where all the family can see her and to share her story with the world. A Story for Sadie is a brave and beautifully written discovery of Sadie’s life and its impact on the author across almost a century of family history.

    

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Donna Langevin, a retired teacher and mother of three sons, wears a triple hat. Poet and playwright, co-author of four ESL books, she is a long-time resident of Toronto. Her latest poetry collections include The Laundress of Time, Aeolus House 2015, In the Café du Monde, Hidden Brook Press 2008 and two chapbooks with Lyricalmyrical Press. She won first prize in the TOPS Contest 2008 and also in the Cyclamens and Swords contest 2009. She was short-listed for the Descant 2010 Winston Collins prize and was awarded second prize in the GritLIT Poetry Competition 2014 and second prize in The Banister Anthology competition 2017.

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