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Written communications have been "a constant theme, professionally and creatively," for Charlottetown poet Catherine Matthews. Her composed and compassionate poems are the most visible extension of her ongoing exploration of relationships, as she says, "of people and place, and language, and culture."
But her creativity is also expressed in the act of making books. "I was fascinated-I still am-by the whole process of putting books together," Catherine says, recalling a career that has already involved her in every stage of book-making, from writing and editing to designing and publishing.
Catherine's latest challenge has been creating one-of-a-kind books, most recently for a gallery exhibition called "Illuminations," "conceived as a show to depict the marriage of image and text." Twelve Island artists created works that were exhibited in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, last fall; some of the pieces are currently showing at UPEI's Robertson Library.
For her "Illuminations" piece, Catherine wrote twelve "variations" on the Qasida form, a pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, rooted in oral tradition and comparable to an ode.."They follow a strict form I haven't followed. But I love the idea of them, the source of them. The Qasida form evokes longing for lost place or lost love-how loss enters our memories and literature."
Catherine's pieces for the show were partially inspired by photographs by Dominique Cruchet, based on "themes such as water, cages, birds, boats on the water-and, so, passage I think of as the passage of time." Qasidas likewise represent a passage over time, a story that reaches a culmination, though Catherine laughs, "mine haven't reached a culmination yet."
After working with words in the civil service in her early career, Catherine "made a great leap" to volunteer work with Ragweed Press, where she then became an apprentice, and later a full-time employee. Connections from Ragweed drew her into the Secret Swarm, a group of performing and publishing poets-about-town.
"Wanting to make books continued in blueSHIFT," Catherine explains, referring to the poetry journal she co-founded, co-edited, and co-published. Under blueSHIFT's imprimatur, she also published finely crafted "little books" featuring some of her individual poems or poem cycles.
Her writing and book-making have continued beyond blueSHIFT. A trip by bus and train last fall led her to add significantly to a work she calls "The Fabulous Carmelle Corn," a work she began as escapism in 1998 and that she now calls "an alter ego auto-bio" about a woman who bills herself an "itinerant euthanasian."
The counterpoint to the escapist "auto-bio" is another unclassifiable work Catherine calls a "memography"-"neither a memoir nor a biography"-of Floyd Trainor, "a visual artist with whom Lily and I shared our lives for a few years." Floyd died in 1998.
"We ran a parallel line for a time," says Catherine. "He was very dear. . . . [The memography is] about loss, generally: about being in this world without some of the things you took for granted." A limited edition will be published, when it is perfected, on handmade paper made by Floyd's sister, visual artist and book-binder Christine Trainor.
Of all her poems, one of Catherine's favourites is "That's Thunder," written when she was pregnant with her daughter, Lily, who is now 12. "Lily is what motivates me, when times are black. She's the most beautiful thing." The responsibility of raising a daughter sometimes leads Catherine to "focus on surviving rather than creating," but it is not a choice she laments. "I continue to write because I am compelled to, not because I have an objective. . . . I haven't taken the plunge to make writing a full-time career. Perhaps my pragmatic side restrains me." Her creative side continues to compel readers with some of the Island's most sensitively rendered poetry of place, and most empathetic reflections on life and loss. Her words are published in small and limited editions that are to be coveted and kept. They are created with care, and bound in beauty.