It’s March. At this time in the semester, I can’t read (or reread) anything unless it’s something I’m teaching. This week, my students and I begin talking about Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream, so I got to reread this wonderful book.

Wonderful, yes, but also horrifying. These poems are scalding, a mosaic of the direct and intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. They are personal, even confessional, although they don’t only reflect Halfe’s own experience at Blue Quills IRS in St. Paul, Alberta, not far from Saddle River Cree Nation, where she grew up; they also speak of the poisonous effects Blue Quills had on her parents and grandparents.

The volume is divided into sections which are marked by family photographs. The mostly carefree smiles in them act as a counterpoint to the description of family relationships in the poems. Not all of those relationships are damaged by residential school and colonialism, but many are, which is a sign of what Jo-Ann Episkenew describes as the “psychological terrorism” that creates the post-colonial traumatic stress response we see in these poems.

These poems are hard to read, but if they were easy to read, if they didn’t provoke anger and deep sadness, they wouldn’t be much good. What other emotions should a genocide, especially one practiced on children, generate in us?

And these poems are good. Better than good. Marvellous. Filled with pain, but free from self pity, as in the second stanza of the opening poem, “Dedication to the Seventh Generation”:

Sit by the kotawân–the fire place.
Drink muskeg and mint tea.
Hold your soul
but do not weep.
Not for me, not for you.
Weep for those who haven’t yet sung.
Weep for those who will never sing.

Silence is a recurring theme in these poems, almost a motif, which makes so much sense, since those institutions were intended to silence the children incarcerated in them. Halfe, thankfully, sings in these poems, in English and in Plains Cree, which is usually translated (where it isn’t, you can use the itwêwina online dictionary if you need to). Let’s be grateful for these poems, and for their author, who has taken such risks by publishing this book.

You might decide to take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Louise Halfe is a friend, and I’m a huge fan of her poetry, so yes, I might be biased. I’ll tell you what: find a copy of Burning in This Midnight Dream in the library, either the first edition, published by the late, great Coteau Books, or the new edition, republished by Brick Books, and try it out. My guess is that you’ll agree with my evaluation.