Reviewer: Louise Carson

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The first section of Gwynn Scheltema’s Everchild is “Breathe”. The assorted poems function as an introduction. The poet is young, middle-aged, old; in Africa, then elsewhere, then returns to Africa. Her first memories are of Zimbabwe; its languages, smells, sounds; her missing mother, her African nurse, her father, and his new wife.

In “Mis-placed” the child hides in a corn field and sees herself as an ear of corn. “Corn purples, greens and yellows melt / into the shadows, hold me with my yellow hair, / my green and purple dress.” She waits a long time until she realizes “not everyone searches / not everyone is found”.

There’s an alcoholic woman in several poems but we don’t know if she’s the poet, her missing mother, or someone else. There’s no grief for her father at the time of his death, but years later, an old, stained sweater brings her to tears. We don’t know whether the sweater reminds her of him or whether he meant less to her than the garment. The section ends with a much older poet waiting at the airport, anxious, afraid of flying—until she hears Cohen’s song Hallelujah, and she and everyone else around her relax.

Many of the poems are mysterious—Scheltema often doesn’t pinpoint identities. It’s left for the reader to infer…or not. And this reader wonders if the many hinted-at mysteries will subsequently be explained.

Part 2 is “Ignite”. The first poem, “House of Worms”, functions as a metaphor for colonialism and for the young child’s life, which is about to get messy. Despite her nurse Nomvala’s distaste, Scheltema messes around with the rotten fruit fallen from a peach tree. “this misplaced tree // from Northern climes, singularly dominating / under this Rhodesian sun, spreading foreign fruit, sweet, // heady, smooth and pale-skinned – abundant, pungent, / slippery sponge rotting, fermenting, infested with worms.” We notice that she’s used Zimbabwe’s pre-1980 name, before independence.

One curious poem is “Lessons for an Underpainter: Oil on Flesh.” The poet finds herself painting on a dead body instead of the canvas. “she watches the paint ooze down his sternum / strokes him there / dabs a soft umber in the cradle of his clavicle // paint the shadows and they will release the light –” One feels this might be a memorial poem…

I can relate to her dread on her wedding day in “Who Giveth?”: “I pull my train heavy / with the weight of ages / on too-young bones –” and “And in the great hall / deep chords toll / the song of my mothers.”

The next poem, “When he comes again” is a rather sad exploration of (her) marital sex. She tries to be calm and distance herself; think of other things. It’s not all bad, though. A few erotic and heartfelt poems follow:

you lure me to love’s cliff edge

convince me passion creates wings

For a while, all is well in the garden, a metaphor Scheltema employs in “What Grows Between Us”. But “The rose that grows / on the arbour has its petals in the sun of the present / and its thorns in the shade of change.” Sure enough, she is supplanted in “I Am Rain” as no one is happy “when rain appears.” He’s found another, and he steals her creativity; his comment about her painting kills it for her in “Unfinished Symphony.”

“Ebb” is the title for part 3, and the mysteries pile up. In “A Stepmother’s Tale” the child is told by her stepmother, that her father wants her to know he’s not her biological father; she’s adopted. They’re driving during a storm spraying people waiting for other transport: “sprayed fans of splash drench people who can’t get away.” As a child, she’s powerless. But look at the poem’s title. A tale almost implies a story—is it a lie?

She’s made tough by all this psychic distress. In one poem, she eats a whole lemon with salt as conscious training in endurance. In another, she remembers only one hug from her absent mother; fantasizes about visiting her childhood home but only as small bird on a windowsill, not as a member of the family. “She makes herself remember / so she can forget.” (from “Going Home”)

In “Full Throated” a poem about the “toads” in her family, she recognizes herself to be one too, and doesn’t much like it. She continues with a couple of snake poems—in one, her reaction is sadness; in the other, fear. She doesn’t try to explain these emotions, so we’ll assume they arise from more unfinished business in her psyche.

Scheltema is on edge, literally, in “Cliff Crying” as she screams along with seabirds. The next poem contrasts. In “My place”, down on the shore, exploring rock pools calms her.

The end of this section contains a tragedy. The poem “Rosetta Stone” contains the shocking line “the day my three-year-old drowned”. She walks by the lake where we assume the accident happened:

Cold to the touch

I slip this stone into my pocket

finger its surface of melded time

wish it were the key to why.

And, much later, she leaves her husband. In “Liberation”, she says “I have opened my own cage”. Yet she doubts she has the strength to fly.

At the end of the book, in Part 4, “Be”, she’s attained age and some measure of happiness. In “Milksong” she re-visits her childhood home, a Zimbabwe farm, now ruined. It’s the sounds she remembers, of the animals, workers, “milk percussing against the sides of the pails / sish sish sish.” Her early childhood is, I suspect, her idea of heaven.

And in “Naartjies” about winter clementines, she harvests another memory. She tosses the skins in her Canadian composter:

so far from their roots,

no longer young, basking under an African sun, welcoming the rain.

She’s also made it into a safe relationship, in a safe place, as she states in “What Matters”. What matters is the man, the countryside, the cat, and “a shared cup of tea / our quiet walk in the blossoming.”

“Memoir” has a nice line: “She gropes for the groin ache of sex.” But instead, finishes the book trying to come to grips with death.

In “I Want To Die at Dawn” she asks “why not dawn to dawn, light to light” instead of the more usual dust and ashes. And “An Arrow of Geese” holds this nice image and language. “High over the lake / an arrow of geese flies / straight from the bow of the North. / The shudder of release quivers / through the autumn air.” And she’s left waiting for winter.

That she feels poised on the edge of something can be inferred from “Moments on a Curved Bridge”:

somewhere

between what was and what is yet to be

between before and become.

A crone is a wise woman who sees far into the past, present and future. And, she’s allowed her wise anger. Many of the poems in Everchild contain anger and that’s as it should be, considering what caused it. So what if some of them are mysterious. Scheltema doesn’t give us everything, but she gives us enough.

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Gwynn Scheltema’s award-winning poetry and fiction have been published in anthologies, journals and magazines in Canada, and South Africa, online and in print. Her debut poetry collection Everchild was released by Aeolus House in 2023.

Louise Carson lives in a bungalow surrounded by gardens. She paid for it by teaching music. Now she just writes. Her most recent books are The Truck Driver Treated for Shock, haiku, Yarrow Press, 2024, and The Cat Looked Back, a mystery, Signature Editions, 2023.