Q: Your poetry collections, What is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press), explores some significant disruptions: addiction and mental health challenges, family estrangement and an unexpected ancestral connection to slavery. How does poetry arise from these difficult realities?
A: As a writer, I’m interested in making meaning, but also in making life meaningful. Life events deliver experiences, and we are guaranteed big helpings of grief and upset and joy. I explore these, initially, so that I can see life more clearly myself. Some of the poems about family estrangement in this book started simply with me wanting to record what was going on – to create a record. But then, I have an urge to do more with it, to explore the nuances of the experiences and to create relationships. What are the connections between this event and that sense of concern or well-being? What does this remind me of? What images are dancing around in my subconscious as I jot down the ‘facts’ of an incident? Why? I don’t set out to answer every question, because life never answers every question. But the poetry becomes one way of processing life. When things begin to fall into place in a poem, to create some clarity for me, the creative work also starts to become something that other people can relate to. There are inevitably points of resonance in the human experience, when is its artfully reflected in a poem or painting or sculpture. The difficult life experiences can become something of deeper value.
What is Broken Binds Us by Lorne Daniel (University of Calgary Press)
What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.
What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.
In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.
Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.
Lorne Daniel
About Lorne Daniel:
Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.