Tom Three Persons
Poet and scholar Yvonne Trainer enriches her complex and haunting portrait of Tom Three Persons, a Native Canadian and the first Calgary Stampede superhero, with a varied collage of images and writings and the personal viewpoint of a prairie ranch heritage.
Reviews
Yvonne Trainer. Damn fine writin’. Yep, that about sums ‘er up. ~Janice Mathie-Heck, filling Station
In poems, photographs, letters and newspaper clippings, Trainer re-imagines a rodeo rider from the Blood Reserve who became champion at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912. Laconic and reflective, Trainer’s writing seems to rein in a lyricism that bursts through in poems like “The Mind Is The Place.” ~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
The language is simple; the narrative uncluttered; the lines spare and clean in the way Bert Almon’s or Glen Sorestad’s lines are clean: this is prairie realism as it should be, born of the soil. The poetic is as true to its subject as the short grass prairie is to the soil. There is no straining after effects or self-conscious posturing or rhetoric. If you think it’s easy to do this, try it! I for one am happy Yvonne Trainer is back with a virtuoso performance. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Yvonne Trainer listens with a poet’s love to the sounds around her. She hears voices, finds poems, in Tom Three Persons’ story. She retells Persons’ world, tells her own world, with such tact and such care we are brought into a new hearing. We listen in on the invented real music of her poetry. ~Dennis Cooley
Yvonne Trainer’s deceptively simple documentary poem about Tom Three Persons engages both the history of a time and place and of a man we should know. In her collage of found material, invention, and photographs, Trainer brings this extraordinary man into language where he can tell his story as it needs to be told. As Tom tells us, “names float in air”, and the poet, listening, catches them and their embodiments for her readers. ~Douglas Barbour
Emotional and physical impressions emerge with bone-crunching reality through this unique collection of poems, letters and reminiscences. A lyrical-narrative portraying highs and lows in the life of Tom Three Persons, an unforgettable First Nations cowboy. Yahoo! ~Shirlee Smith Matheson
Samples
Tom Three Persons
My name is Tom Three Persons I’m no relation to the American Tom Three Persons named because he killed three men I never killed anyone nor robbed a bank nor anything like that I was named because of three women mother saw walking past the door the moment of my birth Father claimed there were no women The door was closed I am not even sure there was a door I may have been born in a teepee I was named because we’re all named Because Bloods believe names float in air I the receiver of a name given I who knew none of this who crowed myself to sleep strapped in my cradle board under the watchful look of crows I who called their name before I knew my own.
the beginning
Born at the beginning of the beginning
Louis Riel hanged
Poundmaker and Big Bear jailed
Born at the beginning
of railroads and fences
and irrigation ditches
built like birth canals
Released
from walls
and flesh
No not released
but kicked a way through
wearing rattlesnake boots
and red angora chaps
Slit the umbilical cord
between sharp guns
faster than a rustler cutting fence
No better yet
rode out of a chute
on a shiny black
bucking horse
a winner.
Learning the Language
What kind of life was that? Jimmy at St. Paul’s Mission School bent like a question mark in a desk writing “I must not speak Blackfoot” one hundred times every time his tongue slipped At that school he learned a powerful new language silence.
