An Open Door in the Landscape by Elisabeth Harvor
Available at Polar Peek Books & Treasures.
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s January 2011 Issue

Let’s start off the year with a poetry recommendation. Poetry is where I go when I need to slow down and reflect, really absorb the world around me in all its fullness and complexity. Lucky for me, one of my favourite writers has a brand new collection this winter. Through the Humber School of Writers, Elisabeth Harvor mentored me during the process of drafting my first two books (a collection of stories called Anything Boys Can Do and a novel called The Bone Cage). I chose Harvor as a mentor because I was already a big fan of her fiction, and I grew to become just as big a fan of her teaching. Now, I’m also a fan of her poetry.

Harvor is a master of the short story, as is evidenced by the Governor General Award nomination she received for her collection Let Me Be the One. Her novels, All Times Have Been Modern and Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, were equally well received with a review in the National Post hailing Harvor as "one of the most eloquent and entertaining writers in Canada today."

Rare is the writer who excels at both fiction and poetry. Harvor, however, makes the cross-genre leap look effortless. Her preoccupations in An Open Door in the Landscape are the same as those of her earlier work: love, obsession, betrayal, longing. There is a startling intensity about all of her work that is especially at home in poetry. Also, the poems in An Open Door take full advantage of Harvor’s disquieting ability to describe the details of everyday life with such originality that the ordinary is no longer ordinary.

Letters permeate this collection. People drafting letters, people mailing letters, people waiting for letters. Letters received. Letters never sent. These missives allow Harvor space to explore human communication and, even more so, human miscommunication. They also give her the opportunity to question how much truth of a person’s life can be captured on the page and how much writers must mine the lives of those around them in order to compose work that is plausible, compelling, and meaningful: "But as you already know, it’s next to/ impossible to protect the privacy of the/ living and still make a story others will find/ all that exciting to read."

Perhaps my favourite poem of the collection is "IN THE CITY I WILL BE FREE, I WILL DO AS I PLEASE THERE." This piece straddles the divide between short-story and poem relaying the tale of a young woman sent off to live with a doctor’s family in the city. It’s a coming-of-age tale, a story of burgeoning sexuality, deceit, desire, misunderstanding, promise, disillusionment and despair. I have to wonder why someone who can write like this would bother with novels. Harvor does as much in five pages as many novelists do in two hundred.

The collection also contains poems that are less narrative in nature. In "THIS IS OUR LIFE" she captures a whole world in just eleven image-soaked lines. "SUNLIGHT FALLS" is written with the intense precision of the very best imagist poets. I refuse to quote from these poems for fear of ruining them – they are meant to be swallowed whole.

The impressive range of these poems alone is worth the cover price. I whole-heartedly recommend An Open Door in the Landscape.