Review by Mack Hassler
“Young Mason would spend much of his time in far off New York City…where there was work to be done in the new Nation.”
Life and Times of Steven Thomas Mason Boy Governor of Michigan, Lawton T. Hemans (1920).
I have been reading for review some books about the early history of Michigan as a frontier state during that time before the Civil War when people had to go East to prove themselves. Most notably the great Abraham Lincoln as a rough frontier lawyer had to convince the sophisticated “bosses” and lawyers of New York City that he could win votes nationwide. Even though Gala Malherbe grew up in Munising and many of her poems are about the Lake Superior coastline of the Big Lake, her book is blurbed by a professor at Northern Michigan who has roots in the East. We are still a cultural frontier, and maybe we still need these endorsements from out of the sophisticated establishment to the East of us. But in this case, I suggest that Malherbe’s Growth Rings: A Memoir in Poems has no need for this apparatus. The professor who writes the blurb, Beverly Matherne, did own a large “ship captain’s” house in the west superbs of Marquette; but as I recall she would rather write on the mythology of Europe than on our images. To put it bluntly, it seems to me the promoter of Malherbe here leans toward being “a Faux Yooper” and though her blurb voices some of the right things about this collection of poems, it fails to emphasize the overall importance of the book and so is misleading.
As I prepare to write this review, I notice on the news (27 April) that the roof has collapsed on an old bookstore in Houghton that I used to root around in each time I could get up there, the Backroom Bookstore in the Old Kirkish Furniture building. Similarly, Malherbe’s dominant images in this set of poems “full-cheeked” and rounded like the rugged forests of large White Pine that covered the region across the UP and just below along the northern lower Peninsula like a blanket—all gone now like my good old bookstore, logged out. Trees are her image and gone trees. The sadness of old age is her topic Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose name is preserved now in just the political entity of the county south of where Malherbe grew up, loved trees. He also worked most of his life producing reference books on the native American languages and lived with and eventually married an Indian woman. Now that is all gone. His reference books are very rare books Similarly, Bishop Baraga sunk his snow shoes deep and ministered to the native Americans. Now he just stands as a mute bronze statue gazing up the long Keweenaw Bay to the opening out into the Big Lake These are the rich, real images of loss and fallen trees that Malherbe captures in her rounded rings of tree growth and death—none of it “faux Eastern”. All of it rooted right in our lives and our passings.
In her set of more than fifty poems about the “growth rings” of her life, the final poem is naturally titled “My Funeral”. Here is the end of the poem:
“There is singing, sappy talk, people reading poems.
I keep an eye on the birds… on our kids,
Feeling nothing but love….
The world goes on, and I become a tree.” (p 91)
At the end, rather than being an Eastern book from Cambridge, this is a UP book. It does not require any pedigree from the East. It is a tree book. The beautiful cover, designed by the family, looks to me just like the huge trunk of one of the last surviving White Pines that still stands alone in the circle outside the cabin I used to own in Baraga County All the rest, for the most part, are gone. But it is enough. This collection is enough.
Growth Rings: A Memoir in Poems, by Gala Malherbe, Cover Photo and design by Gala, Stephane and Julien Malherbe (Harvard Square Press, Cambridge, MA, 2025) 96 pages, pbk, n.p.
