Hardy Friedrich, Way to Inuvik [review]

        A lot of Canadian writers have traveled north to find 
something, or get away from something, and have come back 
with an extra literary (or extraliterary I suppose) awareness 
that produces great writing. Maybe it’s that kind of absence 
that pulls out language from somewhere other than the same 
old always already. Hardy Friedrich found it along the Dempster 
in 2004 and at least part of the result is a punchy little chapbook 
called Way to Inuvik. 
        Friedrich is way too cool for his own good. He reads his 
poetry with a slick chic groove that suits the playful and under-
stated poems he tends toward. There is very little pretension here, 
partly because of the brashness of Friedrich’s youthful (read 
‘hormonally induced’) tack. But also there is a lack of overcon-
structedness that is so easy for new writers to get caught up 
in. In Friedrich I hear the awareness and fluidity of bissett or 
Purdy, the grittiness of Gilbert or McKinnon, the lust of Cohen 
or Kroetsch. 
        Way to Inuvik is a sixtyninebuffalo production—one 
of many chapbook presses that are revving to life in Prince 
George. It is expertly laid out with luxurious margins and crisp 
style. Despite Friedrich’s penchant for poems about aimless 
young male angst, the poems in the book are first and foremost 
about cultural contact, colonialism, and the narrator’s complicity:


           The violent sun of Yukon forest fires
           mends the raven hair of a passing girl


           know nothing
           the edge of her stare
           pushes a blade into
           my history

The landscape is not so much imagery as a collection of clashing 
myths and violations (“violent topography”). There is a careful 
narrator here, one that asks hard questions about subjectivity, 
history, and race:

           copper forever
           covers the history
           of a crown

Friedrich articulates a deep Caucasian fear: the fear that we 
really don’t belong here. And what are we going to do about it? 

           . . . more like a raven
          so big
          will slaughter us on our Starbuck
          sofas and bars and save-ons
          and corporate political or not . . . 

In the place of arrogant colonial presence, Friedrich inserts an 
insecure and questioning consciousness:

         I am alone
                pastey
                loitering

Part of being a writer in Prince George is a sense of alienation, a 
kind of alienation that allows a kind of easy affinity to those others 
who are exiled in this country. Ken Belford, another roving Prince 
George poet,  has written of his connection to the Carrier First 
Nation peoples “I am one of them.” Friedrich offers a similar affinity:


          And far from home
          that is the sky
          where now I
          hold my bones
          Inuit style
          in a pink-lined sunset.

Friedrich’s range is growing and he is yet another new Prince 
George poet to watch.