Good poetry doesn’t invent consolations but discovers them – or maybe not ‘consolations’: it opens up the depths where our life in language shows itself to be still at work, still renewing itself. And the thing about Christmas is that it declares in the most dramatic way possible that what lies in those depths is Not Just Us. . . . This is what all our language is waiting for: this is why we drop a plummet or an anchor into its strange deep places, into the preconscious and apparently random basements of thought, in the trust that such anchorage holds us steady. And if Christmas is indeed something to do with how what’s Not Just Us shows itself to be at home in us, even those who have no idea quite what they might be waiting for have a place at the (s)table.
O is for Christmas is Mia Anderson’s seventh book of poetry, her second with the St. Thomas Poetry Series. St. Thomas’s has been home in another sense: singing for some years in its choir stalls under the direction of John Tuttle, she experienced her call to the priesthood there, in that music. To do her divinity training, she had to leave her belovèd farm and its sheep and goats; then accepted a parish in Québec City, which meant giving up the farm. but taking on (upon retirement) another belovèd landscape: the francophone shores of the St. Lawrence, still in farming country, still producing poetry and vegetables. A far cry from her 5 seasons at the Stratford Festival or her 4 years acting in the U.K., years of rep across Canada or touring the nation with her one-woman show, 10 Women, 2 Men & a Moose showcasing Canadian writers. A far cry, perhaps, from growing up urban in Toronto, attending U of T’s Trinity College for B.A., M.A. and M.Div., then years of theatre and sheep before her first book Appetite was published by Brick in 1988. She has twice won the Malahat Long Poem prize, once the National Magazine Award, and once the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She has done some translating, but mainly strives to continue the daunting legacy of priest-poet.
