Naked Pictures by Rockies poet Mme Paulette Dubé is a curious peek into a curious mind during a curious time in the world.
Peering at the COVID pandemic from her various perches in Jasper’s wildlife-rich Douglas fir forests and along the game trails of the Athabasca River Valley, Dubé felt, she said, a sense of responsibility to pound out seven kilometres per day in her hiking boots and document her observations.
“It was poetry in response to a crisis,” she said.
Those journal entries, together with the sometimes abstract, always atypical images she captured with her camera, became the inspiration for the poems and “field notes” which fill the book’s pages.
The verses—many of which were hatched as social media posts—are mostly short, staccato examinations of the thriving natural world which was running parallel to our pandemic-stunted one. And like a fleeting glimpse of a startled waxwing or the last flare of a sinking sunset, Dubé’s short stanzas are often gone before they register.
“More! she shouts and plucks
the thing from the air
No more! she pinches the air shut”
Recently, Dubé and fellow wordsmith Niki Wilson were plucking away at writerly ideas at the house of words known as the Jasper Municipal Library.
In front of an audience satiated with sweet tea and sourdough bread (one of the pandemic’s positive lasting legacies) the two rehashed the unique and unsettling circumstances the world found itself in. Tucked into our Jasper eddy, protected to some degree by our remoteness and smallness, Dubé’s gratitude to be sheltered from the churning, perilous undertow of a harsher COVID response rings clear.
The world lurches and stumbles
while here the earth pulls free from winter
with wonder, with grace and certainty.
As does her reaffirmation of the most important cocoon.
Some days I need family.
I need my name safe in their mouths.
I need to fill up on their touch,
soft as river touched stone.
“My people” is a complete meal.
Naked Pictures can be consumed as a multi-course literary indulgence, or in small bites, occasionally starting with dessert but always ending with an amuse[d] bouche. After 32 years of writing, roaming and reflecting, Dubé gives her readers much to chew on. Like a hearty sourdough, this fresh batch of poems has been created from a potent culture—one she’s been feeding and fostering for more than a generation.
Find Naked Pictures in Jasper at Basecamp Outfitters, 3 Sheets Jasper, the Friends of Jasper National Park gift shop, at the Jasper Municipal Library and through At Bay Press.
Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com
