Author Note: Shane Neilson

Shane Neilson is a Canadian physician, author, and poet

Shane Neilson's poem, "New Brunswick: A Timeline Legend," was published in Issue 32 of The Puritan.

Town Crier: Does your poem have an interesting origin story/compositional history you’d like to share? This could include interesting factoids or bits of research that informed the poems or the story.

Shane Neilson: My mother died on November 9, 2014. She was born in New Brunswick, and excepting her time acquiring a BScN at Dalhousie University in Halifax, she lived her entire life in New Brunswick. She was sick for a very long time—a protracted, preventable illness that was misdiagnosed in the same hospital she gave her nursing life to.

While she struggled to breathe, and long after she stopped breathing, I thought: what is this place, New Brunswick? What is sacrifice? How much of us is constituted by where we’re born? How much time must we waste with one another?

I wrote out excruciating poems about the imagined history of my province as it pertained to my mother, whom I asked to ghost the province. She agreed, surveying its economic, social, sexual, and medical history. She travelled down the Trans-Canada highway, from the border at Quebec to the mouth of the Saint John River. Poems came from her visitations at all the sizeable communities on that route. She wrote a corona while a stowaway on the Lymphad, the ship that graces the provincial flag.

Yet I needed a poem to contextualize the entire project—something that had a man, a woman, and the whole known history of New Brunswick within. I needed a poem that could serve as a timeline for my family’s history in our province. I needed to tell an old story. I needed a new form.

Trying to solve that problem, I researched the history of New Brunswick by reading several popular and obscure volumes. One of the downmarket versions of these, the New Brunswick Book of Everything (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, 2011), provided me with a date-backbone of important events in the province. I reproduced these dates to create a new history—

That of a common man and woman who live continuously with every moment New Brunswickers have had with one another.

I needed a poem that could serve as a timeline for my family’s history in our province. I needed to tell an old story. I needed a new form.

Whitman had a personal song, and Williams sung a place. I tried to sing both: a local pride and born here of parents born here from parents the same.

TC: Tell us the best thing you’ve read lately, or a poet/fiction writer you’re jealous of, or a story/short story collection you wish you wrote.

SN: I am going to tell you about a book that you, too, will be jealous of: Jeffery Donaldson’s The Missing Link: The Metaphor of Evolution and the Evolution of Metaphor (McGill-Queens, 2015). Donaldson, a professor of poetics at McMaster University, is another one of those people I seem to gravitate to: talent disproportionate to renown. For over a decade, my appreciation of his talent was restricted to his literary criticism and poetry. But this past year, he blew my mind with his scholarly book on metaphor.

I’ve been making metaphors, reading about metaphors, and writing on metaphors for a long time. But then, damn it, Jeffery publishes an accessible scholarly text that argues for metaphor as not just an organizational and meaning-making combinatorial force in human life, but also as an interactive force with physical effects, that metaphor informs the very processes we call “science.” His argument is delightfully plausible, and it’s only the main argument in a book that ranges through several fields in order to demonstrate the primacy of metaphor in all human endeavour.

You’ve never seen metaphor done this way, you’ve never thought of it like this, you didn’t conceive that metaphor could work like this. Jeffery guides the reader in prose inspired by the method of his master, Northrop Frye—he writes in smooth, simple prose that belies profundity and complexity. I can’t recommend the book enough. I think it’s essential reading for any poet since it provides a historical summary of the history of metaphor, a gentle polemic for the cause of poetry, a respectful conversation with what passes as capital-S Science (you see, I could never be an ambassador, too much Swift in me!), and a great expansion on what is even possible with language. So go ahead, get the book, and renovate your mind such that you see metaphors everywhere, why they are everywhere, and how they got to be everywhere.

Shane Neilson is a poet from New Brunswick. His third trade book of poems, On Shaving Off His Face, was published by The Porcupine’s Quill in March 2015. He was recently named by The Capilano Review as the winner of the Robin Blaser Award.