Before we had names
time was ice

de Leeuw tells the story of the Skeena River in northern British Columbia through a collection of poetry, news articles, and other historical records. 'Skeena' is one of those works best read in one setting as every piece is interconnected, each poem further developing the character of the river itself.

Rather than anthropomorphise The Skeena, de Leeuw seems to go out of her way to create something distinctly non-human in her characterization. In keeping with its nature, the Skeena is a force that observes and interacts with the life around and within it, but with detachment. It can feel something like sorrow, something like hunger, something like love, but not exactly. Not like we do. It doesn't really understand names and language, but indulges with a sort of baffled amusement and curiosity. The alienness she captures is almost uncanny in places.

The river at once relishes the fish that live in it, the refuse from the forest, a piece of claw a bear loses in a fight, the body of a squirrel that sink to the bottom. But it equally relishes the owlet and the moose that drown in it, bones snapping as they're dragged along in the current.

It watches humans build settlements and roads and bridges, feeling sorrowful when a bridge cuts it in half, but then a century before it swelled up and destroying an entire village, and a century later it destroys the roads.

I guess the lesson is that people can tame nature in some ways, but not in others, and not forever. And nature continues on regardless, finding a way through cracks and crannies. Maybe not right away, but eventually.

I'm not sure how true that is in reality, but over the course of its life in the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of years that we experience the Skeena grow and shrink and grow again, de Leeuw crafts a strong impression that it is.

The documents do a wonderful job contextualizing each set of poems, but the poetry itself is definitely what makes 'Skeena' memorable.

It's not a collection you could open and easily find a line with which to caption your nature shot on Instagram, but taken together she's created something truly magical.

Her employment of poetry to tell this story feels essential, and in reading it you realize the river couldn't speak any other language.

I enjoyed that, while definitely modern in construction, the poetry took many styles and certainly many forms.

I'm generally skeptical of poetry that zigzags around on the page, but de Leeuw convinced me she knew what she was doing. You get a real sense of the choppy water, the tide, the rain hitting the surface in the way she puts the words down. It doesn't always work perfectly, and not everyone is interested in the level of work it takes to keep reading in the correct rhythm, or even to find it at all, especially if not reading out loud, but even then, there are some standout moments.

In one poem, she uses the words to form the bridge she's describing, in another, she puts down strings of letters as a sort of abstract representation of the sound of rain on water.

It's lovely, it's playful, it's serious, it's wonderfully alive.

When snow reaches belly height
even moose
tread tiredly --
a trailing tunnel
a scar
on winter white
One night
the girl
called out to me --
I'm going to climb into you
and freeze (p.31)