Patient Frame by Steven Heighton
– available at Polar Peek Books & Treasures in Fernie
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s July 2010 Issue
 Steven Heighton is coming to Fernie! I know at least a few literary ladies in Fernie whose feet haven’t touched ground since they heard the news. Plus, it’s not only Fernie’s writing community who thinks Heighton is hot stuff – lately, I can’t seem to open a national newspaper without seeing him and his words splayed across the book section. And soon he will be here in Fernie, with nothing to do but talk writing with us.
Heighton has published thirteen books (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry). His award-winning work has been translated into ten languages, and he has taught at prestigious writing programs in locales ranging from St. Petersburg, Russia to the Banff School of Fine Arts. And (did I mention?) this month he is coming here to Fernie, to teach writing to us?
Over-achiever that he is, he has simultaneously released a brand new novel and a brand new poetry collection. My most recent pleasure is the poetry collection: Patient Frame (House of Anansi 2010).
Heighton’s work is noted for its ambitious range. Living up to Heighton’s reputation, Patient Frame delves into remarkably diverse topics. He quotes Elizabeth Taylor, Dave Bidini, Robert Kroetsch, the Saxon Chronicles, and Martin Amis (find a pattern there, I dare you). He explores the My Lai massacre, parental love, capitalism, natural disaster, Haitian revolution, pedophilia, the court of Medici, adolescence, and a sprawling host of other topics that together cannot be easily classified, generalized, and categorized. If you are a reader who turns to books to take you to new places and stretch your mind in unexpected ways, I’m pretty sure your twenty bucks couldn’t do better than Patient Frame.
For me, the personal domestic poems at the heart of this collection have the most power. “Home Movies 8 mm,” for example, concludes with a poignant reminder that I plan to write in bold across my fridge, my bathroom mirror, my steering wheel, and my computer screen: “If I could start over, I would stare and stare.”
Heighton’s other poems featuring intimate moments in regular day-to-day life move me just as deeply. “The Last Reader,” for example, focuses on a dying mother trying to read her son’s first book as she slowly goes blind: “this plot no lamp can brighten.” Another favourite—“Herself, Revised”—tries to mark the liminal moment at which a daughter grows too old to want bedtime stories read by her father: “How does the end enter? [….] Maybe it doesn’t enter at all./ It was there in every sentence: the end.”
Patient Frame deals with intense human emotion and the impossibility of doing it justice with words: “How can your heart pin down the phrase/ by which it might be grasped? We lose,/ in translation, the words we know./ Say a thing and it turns untrue/ and leaves the deep spring’s face sound-scarred./ Drink from the source. Don’t say a word.”
The marvel of poetry is it keeps trying – trying to speak the unspeakable, trying to describe that which can’t be described, trying to capture that which can’t be captured. Come hear Steven Heighton try – here in Fernie at Polar Peek Books on July 19th, 7pm.
Copyright © 2010 by Angie Abdou, Ph.D.
– Angie Abdou is a local fiction writer. She will be presenting a sneak peek of her forthcoming ski-bum novel (The Canterbury Trail) at the Fernie Heritage Library on July 18th at 7pm. For more information on Angie’s publications and upcoming speaking engagements, see this website.
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