I found Michael Goodfellow’s new book at a shop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in the county of its title. I asked the bookseller if Folklore of Lunenburg County was a compilation of versified traditional tales. They assured me: no, it’s something else.
Indeed, there are no sea-shanty lyrics, settler narratives, herbal cures or appropriated Indigenous stories. Folklore of Lunenburg County is certainly about place, but place both anonymous and haunted. The folklore—primarily practices for reading meaning into phenomena—is broken into discrete components and blended with direct or intuited observations, all presented as if unearthed in minor ruins or revealed in rolls of beach wrack. “As if landscape was natural for ghosts. As if the natural always held more than nature.” Despite being divided into one- or two-page poems, the book has a consistent, synesthetic flow.
The poetic mode is not full-spectrum post-modern, despite Goodfellow’s collagist method. There are no popular culture references or playful register shifts. Even the very rare appearance of modern technology feels retro: “fog the grain of television static.” The only digital era reference is to cell phones, but contemplated as lost overboard from a river ferry.
On the other hand, Goodfellow is not anecdotal or autobiographical. The lyric “I” doesn’t appear until page 22, and immediately retires into the underbrush:
I learned early that distance was the colour of water:
the yellow-grey-green of something fallen…
The first-person plural occurs more often, though whether it indicates a historical collective, siblings, friends, or lovers is always ambiguous. The most common pronoun is the elegiac “you” of the absent or departed, also never specified in number or relation to the author.
Rarest is the sort of “you” that suggests a beloved:
We kept to the fields.
Your dark hair ate light
like chestnuts split open,
the dark glossy
because it was soft,
the sky a caught moth …
The word “limerence” provides a key to Goodfellow’s impersonal approach. It appears early: “Shape of the limerent object carved into a certain kind of wood, then burned on the new moon ….” I assumed this was an old word of divination, but it was coined in the 1970s to denote an obsessive, one-sided romantic fixation. Apart from the significant other implied by the lines quoted above, no personal “limerent object” is ever introduced.
The word appears again in the titles of a diptych: “Limerence as Acadian Forest” and “Limerence as Shore Wrack.” Inland we are told “How the forest marked what had been, / further, older: / white pine where the farm had stood.” And on the shore “each thing less / than what it was: / rockweed tossed // and crackled, shelled, / posts filled with sand // where pilings stood.”
Folklore of Lunenburg County is light on argumentation, but there is an ideological framing. In the first poem we get a glimpse of an alternate Eden: “They called it the end but this was a circle. / Wasn’t the beginning a forest? / Wasn’t it dark?”
In the final poem there is a bookend to this hint. Goodfellow considers “belsnickling, the revelers dressed up in the fur of animals.” This stands out as the only identifiably ethnic tradition that we encounter. It’s German, though that’s not mentioned. In a book that draws heavily on existing ethnographic folklore research, this de-nationalizing makes troubling what might have seemed merely quaint.
Without mentioning Christ, Mummers, or the Grinch, Goodfellow makes his case:
It wasn’t about thanks but about terror. Not about the cross or resurrection but about ground juniper, alder and winter holly. Not resurrection but life in death. Colour in winter.
These are not the book’s final words. Folklore of Lunenburg County may be pagan in spirit, but it’s no manifesto. The final poem closes by returning to the book’s ongoing stream of uncanny signs and manifestations, including “a witch or a devil in the form of a blade of straw” and a rare contemporary jump-scare: “a misfolded prion.”
