Book Review - Lake of Two Mountains by Arleen Paré

A much smaller lake ~
Swan Lake in Victoria with just as many memories

I’ve done book reviews each month throughout each Book Club season for about two years now. This month's book has presented me with an extraordinary challenge. Lake of Two Mountains by Arleen Paré is a slim volume of poetry, has no story line, plot line and clearly identifiable characters are missing! And this evening, I am missing an image of the book because of my very unpoetic technical difficulties.

However, this book of poetry does have more than one theme. The history of Lake of Two Mountains, part of the river delta at the confluence of the Ottawa River in Quebec and the St. Lawrence River, has been painted with brush strokes of emotion and memory. Natural history portrayal of the Pleistocine era in Becoming Lake - ‘shove mountain tops   from below stony roots’  evokes the power of geographical changes. Personal presence walks through summer lanes while young sisters are ‘seeding the road’. Religious history of the Trappist monastery from the abundance of fields, barns, produce and kitchens to their exit many years later when ‘night galloped through cloisters, cracked stones from walls, trampled gardens of lavender and mint.'  Political history and our presence on this land in the painful time of the Oka Crisis brought us to the question of land ownership and who really are the visitors here:‘who owns the land, what was taken, which priests, who owns the trees. Nation to nation.’ These are mere samples from the fifty seven poems that Arleen Paré penned so beautifully.

Our discussion was fascinating accompanied by laughter and tears. Each of us read a poem, we then discussed it with widely ranging interpretations. What was common to us all was that many of the personal experiences at the Lake of Two Mountains in Ontario transferred in memory to the lakes experiences at any other lake across Canada, and probably elsewhere. Will there be another book of poetry for our next season? Consensus today supports a very positive response.

“He called the lake Shangri-La.”

~ Arleen Paré, Dad Before Lake

Title:  Lake of Two Mountains
Author:  Arleen Paré
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: 2014
Format:  Soft Cover
ISBN: 0-525-94917 (hc.)
ISBN: 978-1-926829-87-6 (pbk.)
Type:  Poetry