Discovery Passages

With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captain Vancouver's original sailing route. These poems draw upon both written history and oral tradition to reflect all of the respective stories of the community, which vocally weave in and out of the dialogics of the text. A dramatic symphony of many voices, Discovery Passages uncovers the political, commercial, intellectual and cultural subtexts of the Native language ban, the potlatch ban and the confiscation and sale of Aboriginal artifacts to museums by Indian agents, and how these actions affected the lives of both Native and non-Native inhabitants of the region. This displacement of language and artifacts reverberated as a profound cultural disjuncture on a personal level for the author's people, the Kwakwaka'wakw, as their family and tribal possessions became at once both museum artifacts and a continuation of the tradition of memory through another language. Morse's continuous poetic dialogue of "discovery" and "recovery" reaches as far as the Lenape, the original Native inhabitants of Mannahatta in what is now known as New York, and on across the Atlantic in pursuit of the European roots of the "Voyages of Discovery" in the works of Sappho, Socrates, Virgil and Frazer's The Golden Bough, only to reappear on the American continent to find their psychotic apotheosis in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott. With tales of Chiefs Billy Assu, Harry Assu and James Sewid; the family story "The Young Healer"; and transformed passages from Whitman, Pound, Williams and Bowering, Discovery Passages links Kwakwaka'wakw traditions of the past with contemporary poetic tradition in B.C. that encompasses the entire scope of relations between oral and vocal tradition, ancient ritual, historical contextuality and our continuing rites.

About the Author :
Garry Thomas Morse Garry Thomas Morse has had two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), and one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009) published by Talonbooks. His current book of poetry, After Jack (2010), is also available from Talonbooks. Morse received the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

Review :
"Discovery Passages is a vital cross-cultural work, urgent in both its anger and its celebration. Morse's supple voice lifts off the page while the stripped-down quotes in the documentary poem are presented in all their damning evidence, no further comment necessary. His longer poem 'Wak'es' with its literary echoes, is the most ironically intelligent statement I've read on -cultural theft." -- Daphne Marlatt "Adept, stunning, startling, and necessary, Discovery Passages performs an uncanny operation on the archives, reactivating some stories and decommissioning others so that we can breathe more fully today. This poetic excavation of the injustice inflicted on the Kwakwaka'wakw people is insightful, tender, and brutal in its scope. Here, "language is, portaging across global debris ... " -- gleaning the trash of history to make poetry that takes back what was stolen from Morse's ancestors. This book includes the funniest dressing down of Duncan Campbell Scott I have ever read, snatching dignity away from colonial thieves and restoring it back into the communities where it belongs." -- Rita Wong "These are passages planked by images of island life. Waves of words spoken by elders flood the poems, which crash into excerpts of Indian Affairs policies and paternalistic state documents. There are 500 years and 500 lines of unspeakable anguish but there is also a knowing, smiling resistance. Morse's words are rhythmic as wild salmon, departing to explore a wider ocean but always coming back home." -- Russell Wallace