March 24, 2025
Votive, by Annick MacAskill
In February (for the second year running!), my eldest daughter’s high school drama group won their district-level competition for the NTS Drama Festival (which many of us will recognize from back when it was the Sears Drama Festival), and I’m very excited that they’ll be part of the regional competition at Hart House Theatre in April performing their wonderful play, something infinitely more useful than poetry.
And I’m excited, not just because the play is terrific (it is!), but because it’s based on poetry by Governor’s General Award-winning Annick MacAskill, whose beautiful books are published by Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, and the opportunity to see teenagers reciting Canadian contemporary poetry like they mean it is so good for my heart. It also meant that I had a perfect excuse to buy MacAskill’s latest book, Votive, and leave it lying around the house and my teen would even pick it up and flip through it.
Votive includes the poem “Praying for Rain,” which closes the performance, and from which the play takes its title, my daughter reciting, emphatic, “Still rain/ seemed like the only hope,/ the way it might charge the gaps/ left by humans, machines, and words.” (The high school performance does not continue into the next line about hot flashes….)
I loved this book, whose allusions include Freddie Prize Jr, Calla from Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, Penelope, and Sinead O’Connor. These are poems about rituals, about devotion, religion, love, coming-of-age, queerness, knitting environmental devastation, the internet, good poems, bad poems, and the patron saint of rain.
Bring it.
