I first came to Shani Mootoo’s work through her short stories, then her novels, and then found her visual art. Reading her poetry in Cane | Fire was a treat; a dive into familiarity but full of the remarkable capabilities of this multi-genre author. 

Themes and scenes present in Mootoo’s oeuvre appear in Cane | Fire, specifically the way Mootoo explores the different places of her life from Ireland to Trinidad to Canada. To echo the physical movement between countries explored in the book, Mootoo heavily utilizes blank space throughout the collection, creating oceans in the gaps between lines. The book is divided into three sections, each denoted by a stalk of sugarcane. 

Mootoo’s skill with world-building and narrative is present as she constructs detailed scenes, allowing the reader to “crouch” next to the narrator along these journeys. In “Veranda,” she writes: 

you crouch behind your potted jungle 

     and watch 

the charm of girls in green skirts and white blouses 
glimmer through the latticed doors 
of a white walled madrassa 

The flow of the lines on the page creates a slow movement, a following of sight.  

A particularly striking aspect of Cane | Fire is the inclusion of Mootoo’s visual art in the collection. The artworks are poems, and the poems are artworks. The poem “Beware” spans ten pages, with the left-hand page featuring a sparse line of text and the right-hand page featuring one-fifth of a full image. Put together, the text reads “Beware / the insider / who tries / to break / out.” The slices of images come together to create a portrait with hands clawing away at the figure. This is Mootoo at her best, hooking the reader through careful suspense. 

The second section of the collection is a single long poem titled “A Crick in the Crack.” The poem is structured around the refrain “time was.” It moves through water and waves, creating a relationship between the abstract time and the tangible water. Mootoo writes: 

I lost my shoe

grasped your hand 
as if it were breath 

and anchored my heels 
into the sliding sand 

She builds intimate connections between the narrator and the poem’s subject, turning them into the relationship between wave and sand as well. 

The third and final section opens with a sequence of poems titled with a compass pointing in different directions. The poems orient towards parents, with the mentions of a father being the most felt. Mootoo describes how he “tells the same tales, gen an agen // it ends, it always ends // i’d like to have stood like him.” 

This section contains more visual art, these pieces featuring Hindu deities with family photographs superimposed on top. The photographs are the kind you would find in family albums, while the images of the deities are similar to those found in temples and sacred spaces. The superimposition makes both deity and family exist in the same space, despite the two being different in visual aesthetic and practical use. This duality echoes the title of the book, “Cane | Fire,” separated by a line but part of the same. 

Cane | Fire is a testament to the multi-skilled novelist, poet, and artist that Shani Mootoo is. In this collection of poetry, Mootoo has shown the connection between all these art forms. 

Manahil Bandukwala is a visual artist and writer. She is Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry, and Digital Content Editor for Canthius, and is a member of VII, an Ottawa-based creative writing collective. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022). See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.