Poet’s reciprocity with the dark for its gifts completes trilogy

Something for the Dark, Randy Lundy’s latest collection of poetry, is a powerful offering both to the reader and to the dark.

“I am gifting something to the dark for whatever the dark has given to me. And/or I am preparing for a descent into the unknown realms, and who knows what might be encountered or discovered?” wrote Lundy in an email interview with Windspeaker.com. “For me, it’s an “and.” Both ways of reading that “for” (in the title) make sense to me.”

Something for the Dark is the final installment in a trilogy that the Cree, Irish and Norwegian member of the Barren Lands First Nation in Manitoba began with Blackbird Song (2018) and continued with Field Notes for the Self (2020).

The trilogy draws on members of Lundy’s family, with his father more of a “spectral presence” in all three books, but especially Something for the Dark.

Lundy wrestles with his conflicted emotions in “Bach and my Father,” as he writes, “We never did that/for each other, showed that we cared,/my father and me. Never kissed or/hugged, didn’t even shake hands./Something unspoken but threatening/in the press of one man’s flesh against/another’s.”

Lundy’s father died when Lundy was a young man but remains a persistent presence in his life and writing.

“While I had many conflicted feelings toward him, the loss was devastating for me,” he said. “He was a hard man to live with, but hell, I loved him fiercely, too.”

Lundy says that his poems draw on his life experiences but are not strictly autobiographical. He points to “Thinking of the Botticelli Girl” and “Directions, Driving back to Saskatchewan,” explaining that each merges his actual experiences of those times with experiences of other times as well as invented experiences.

“The goal is to tell a good story or make a good poem, not to recount details with absolute accuracy. Facts in and of themselves can be rather boring, and the truth of a situation is usually something more than what simple facts can account for,” he said.

Lundy’s poems also draw on and are grounded in the southern and east-central Saskatchewan landscape where he grew up. In “Land Claim,” he writes, “The land, it seems, is like that—it stakes a claim/and holds on dearly, no matter how far/we take ourselves away.”

“The title (of that poem) is a bit of a play on the way that phrase ‘land claim’ is generally used in Indigenous legal contexts. Usually, we apply the term to land claimed by Indigenous communities. In this case, and in keeping with Indigenous ways of knowing, the poem talks about the land claiming people,” said Lundy.

“The poems are actually gifted to me from and by the land itself. That’s how I think about it, anyway… We might move from one place to another, but if we have really lived in a particular place, long and well, then that place comes with us wherever we might move. The land never lets go of us, or us of it.”

In the seven years it has taken Lundy to complete the trilogy, both his life and poetry style have changed.

Something for the Dark has been influenced by Paul Zimmer, an American poet that Lundy “stumbled upon by accident” and whose style he was attracted to because his work is on “everyday life, straightforward language and ordinary situations.”

While Blackbird Song and Field Notes for the Self occasionally trend towards complex diction or difficult vocabulary, Something for the Dark is more straightforward. And unlike the two books which Lundy says are more “inward looking,” the third book “turns outward…more focused on human relationships, on the social in that sense.” Poems such as “A Note on the Use of the Term Genocide” and “A Brief Historical Atlas of the Canadian Prairie” directly tackle issues of Indigenous/settler relations in Canada.

As for Lundy himself, he says the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s has been a period of sobriety.

“As corny as it might sound to say it, poetry quite literally saved my life. Not poetry alone, but in part,” he said. “I mentally made a list of reasons to continue living, and…one of the things was that I had more poems to write…so I had to make peace with the addiction. I had to give up the alcohol or I wasn’t going to live long enough to write more poems. I gave up the liquor, and just last year I finally managed to quit the cigarettes, too.”

Something for the Dark completes the trilogy and includes work of which Lundy is proud. He believes he’s said what’s needed to be said in these three books and is hopeful readers can find “something that speaks to them, their lives and experiences in ways that are meaningful.”

But his journey is not yet over.

“It’s just on to the next chapter,” he said. “However, it does feel like something has changed…Now it’s a question of what’s next, what needs to be said next and how, and I’m really not sure. We’ll see!”

Something for the Dark is published by the University of Regina Press and was released Sept. 2. It can be pre-ordered at https://uofrpress.ca/.

This story was originally published in Windspeaker. It is republished under a Creative Commons license as part of the Local Journalism Initiative.