Clea Roberts
Clea Roberts
Biography
Clea Roberts lives on the outskirts of Whitehorse, Yukon, in the traditional territory of Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council.
Her poetry has been translated and published internationally and has been nominated for the League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award and a National Magazine Award. She has received fellowships from the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, Vermont Studio Centre and is a five-time recipient of the Yukon Advanced Artist Award.
Clea facilitates a poetry and grief workshop through Hospice Yukon. She also works in screenplay and fiction and holds a MFA from University of British Columbia’s creative writing program.
Poetics Statement
“It’s inevitable that landscape seeps into writing, whether we are writing from an urban, a rural, or a wild place. And there are many kinds of landscape—the physical, the aural, the psychological and the social, just to name a few.
I write from a perspective where landscapes overlay and overlap each other with different degrees of transparency and liminality. I am drawn to the interplay and accretion of landscape and language, as well as how this dynamic can change our understanding of ourselves and our environment.
“The ethos of Roberts’ writing is ecological, taking only what is needful,
retrieving more from less.””
“Clea Roberts writes poems of clear, quiet beauty. They contain the silence of perception: alive to the world with open eye and open heart.”
“Clea Roberts’ second poetry collection, Auguries, is a stellar depiction of grief amidst the brightness of new life... Roberts is mistress of the line break, creating breathtaking stanzas—even whole poems—that read like runes.”
“There is a northernly edge to Clea Roberts’s poems, and it extends past the obvious content. It has to do with exquisite frostbitten brevities; it has to do with imagining a northern space with scrupulous musically-attuned attention; and—not least—it has to do with an awareness of snow’s ‘convincing logic,’ capable of pulling you ‘softly/into a ditch’ and sending explanations of ‘eider and light.’ These are poems whose delight lies in seeing, and listening, afresh.”
“[Roberts’s] images of the landscape and climate are not only crisp and precise, but manage to speak about the physical conditions of this place and its emotional landscape in one and the same lyrical breath... One cannot help but think of past Canadian masters when reading Roberts’ vivid portrait... Roberts writes with a rare and haunting musicality.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Riverine
Where the Nisutlin grew shallow
and swift, we rested our
paddles on the gunwales,
only dipping them to steer.
We watched the riverbed,
the astonishing velocity
of the round, green boulders
passing beneath us,
and the red-backed spawners
slipping upstream through
the shadows cast by clouds.
And the kingfisher
we startled into flight, gliding
furtively from one sweeper to the next,
while the small bruin raised its snout
in the air, and catching our scent,
turned back into the forest
as we drifted by
and around the bend.
*
Every night the wolves called
into the unreachable parts of us
and you laughed in your sleep.
It wasn’t your usual laugh—
it belonged to the woman
who walked naked into the river
each morning, right to the top of her thighs,
and sunk down, purposefully,
kneeling on the soft gravel to bathe, to see
every heartache suddenly flattened
and carried away on the river’s
sun-scalloped surface,
a driftwood fire
blazing on the shore.
Transmutations
I
While we slept
the snow fell quietly
filling in the yard’s
grey and brown truths
with explanation
of eider and light.
The white weight
you feel first
under the eyelids
before waking.
It carries you down
the path to the river —
the dark, rogue tongue
catching drifts
as you squat on the bank
small and bellowing
but muted.
Test to see how far
the voice carries
under the circumstance
and just how far
it peals into the forest —
knots of black branches
wearing the snow
like sleeves.
Then test to see how far
the words carry
and at what point
they come back to you
like small, hungry animals
capable of being tamed,
of haunting your windows.
II
We set out the ice lanterns,
feel the air’s cold reluctance
in our throats,
skate slow, imperfect circles
on the lake ice
to its electric whimper,
the saw blade falsetto.
We are skating, we are dancing
because the mail strike is over,
because perfect white envelopes
arrive at our wreathed doors,
because peaches radiate
like gentled suns in the root cellar,
because this afternoon is dark
again, taking our dim
lamps to its breast.
Somersault into snowbank!
The empty thud of mittens
meeting in applause.
III
And there are days
that begin
with the sound
of trucks whistling
down the highway,
their J-brakes
a thick stutter,
the lonely syllables
of dawn.
Trucks bringing
the bread and the milk,
the table and chairs,
the newspaper,
the blue curtains,
whole lives in fact
or at least the pieces.
IV
The wind pulls snow
across the road,
armfuls of transient
white veil.
In the rear view
a raven shrugs
and flies off.
The sky is blind.
The road will carry you
a certain distance.
What is left
to understand?
You know
there is more ahead
than what is seen.
For instance,
the wrestle with the wheel,
the convincing logic
of snow drifts
wrapping the tires,
pulling you softly
into a ditch.
V
Our house shudders
in the storm,
the snowflake vertigo.
There’s a candle
on the table,
a talisman
or a lure.
We watch movies
with clever actors,
talk with friends
long distance,
put a log on the fire
and poke it
for good measure,
close the blinds
and dream
of the moon’s
lean light.
VI
Moon when coyote
is my shadow.
Moon of the snapping
willow thickets.
Moon of the
missing cats.
Moon of the potluck.
Moon of tock, tock
at the woodpile.
Moon of filched
sleep.
Moon that raises our chins
with light years,
traces the camber
of a wing.
VII
And just as you remember
the winter you gave in,
you remember how you got there
walking to the mailbox
through a hoarfrost
the bright arteries of poplars
holding all the world’s
light and space in their branches.
You were suddenly content
with your diminishing,
frayed boundaries
--the weather, its intent
and randomness
too big for you.
The boots were rated to -50 c
— you wore an extra pair of socks.
VIII
It was a thin winter
for rabbits, and therefore
a thin winter for lynx.
February ate
a cord of wood,
a snow shovel,
and a beaver hat.
The swans came back
when they came back,
their broad wings scraping
the sky with a sound
like breath panting.
And that afternoon
on Main Street,
while trucks idled
into a fog,
you bought
beeswax candles
and held the good story
of wood smoke
in your mouth.