“By the Don, beneath the bridge, gargoyles brought to earth, scale-model dragons and angels of revisionist history, beasts of Bay Street brought low and eye to eye with ideology and staghorn sumac …”

Jane and the Monsters for Beauty, Permanence, and Individuality by Tanis MacDonald from Mobile (2019)

Who better than a poet to orchestrate uncommon magic on a gray Saturday morning in the heart of the noisy city?

Poet Tanis MacDonald took a handful of us lucky souls on a journey on just such a morning in Toronto. Dressed for soggy, brisk conditions with the possibility of more rain, we walked from Broadview subway station south to Riverdale Park, across the park to a footbridge over the busy Don Valley Parkway. On the other side of the bridge, we slipped onto the Lower Don River Valley Trail … and into another world.

Even with the traffic roaring nearby, we were on a sylvan path, surrounded by trees and bushes in burgeoning autumn regalia, with birds of many feathers wheeling overhead. A kilometer or so along the trail and we almost literally stumbled on the mysterious site we were seeking: Omaskeko Cree artist Duane Linklater’s “Monsters for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality”, an installation of haunting cast concrete gargoyles. (Learn more about them here and here.)

The site and sculptures are some of the inspirations for poet MacDonald’s new collection Mobile, described so intriguingly and, to my mind, invitingly as “an uncivil feminist reboot of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Other Poems; an urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability; an homage to working and walking women in a love/hate relationship with Toronto, its rivers and creeks, its sidewalks and parks, its history, misogyny and violence.”

There, in that moment of discovery, the perfect thing was for the poet to read the poem, amidst sculptures that mimic the gargoyles and grotesques that adorn municipal buildings, academic institutions and churches … and are arranged as if they dropped from the heavens and just lay scattered and toppled in the unmanicured grass and sumac.

We listened to the poem below the Bloor Viaduct, which vibrates with its own iconic significances. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds for the first time that morning, eventually exposing enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of pants. (Hey, Tanis!) What surprising and potent alchemy in this collision of past and present, urban and natural, hidden and revealed, words, birdsong, traffic …