In response to her brother's sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores
the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish Sea
on Vancouver Island's east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two
thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose
delight was summers spent at Deep Bay.
Hoogland looks to her child-experiences of death, as well as to
literature, chaos theory, dark matter, geological time and the effect of
noise pollution on whales. She turns grief round and round, enlarges it,
pushes beyond received ideas of closure and grief's stages. Death is not
only part of life; the dead assign their unfinished work to the living.
Hoogland's narrator puts in the time. Listens. Attends. But the
responsibility for connection belongs as much to the dead as to the
living.
The book's form, a long poem, provides thematic coherence for the
multiple contingencies that disturb the narrator's present. Like keeping
balls up in the air, Hoogland expertly catches and tosses, thus
sustaining her imaginative energies throughout the book. Here she is,
contemplating the cliché that life flashes before the eyes of the dying,
or questioning the memories stored in her body like trauma or fat, when
suddenly there she is, fifty years earlier, constructing the highway at
the accident site. The reader participates in Hoogland's excavations as
she leans in, digs up an absurdity, hits a fault line. Similarly, she
inquires deeply into her brother's life, listening for what he reveals.
Through spare, never-sentimental language, Hoogland's lyric resources
are adequate to human loss and suffering. I see reflected in my
daughters' faces / the story my brother animates. / He opens his hands,
/ shapes a funnel his life / pours through.
Part emotional excavation and part memorial, Trailer Park Elegy is a
deeply moving meditation on how to be present when [t]he worst has
already happened. Retracing her brother's steps in the wake of his
untimely passing, Cornelia Hoogland attends to grief until the field of
his death / becomes my field, and little by little, her brother's life
overlaps with her own as a kind of dark matter. An intensely poignant,
heart-rending read.
-Jim Johnstone, author of The Chemical Life
