Was Paradise ever pristine? Is perfection even desirable? Mention Salt Spring Island and elicit Utopia. Mona Fertig has lived there for fifteen years and in this long poem chapbook she laments the island's decline.

Each stanza is prefixed, "This is paradise,"; followed by accounts of its flaws and cracks. Grazing pastures become vineyards, Americans buy up waterfront, the history of racism conveyed by buried rice bowls, the First Nations' dead, the idealistic hippies, grown old, cut their greying hair, are felled by arthritis, artists hustle tourists like hookers, the kids leave for the city. There are food banks and homelessness.

What's to be done? Fertig's elegiac descriptions are more shadow than light. The tone is resignation, a requiem. Paradise cannot be grasped; as soon as one tries to corner it in words or own it as real estate, it slips out of reach. How far can the notion of earthly Paradise be shifted before it snaps? If all perfection is flawed, where is the point where flaws outweigh vision? A reader prone to philosophizing about environment and civilization will find much to dwell on in this long poem.

One is reminded of the inscription from Ovid, quoted by another Salt Spring Islander, Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress: "Clever human nature, victim of your inventions, disastrously creative."; Only in the final stanza does Fertig offer a slim hope in the promise of Beauty, always returning in spite of the destruction. "Beauty walks the beach barefoot with herons, cradles Hope.";
The old acreage is subdivided. The activists are burned out. Politics are hypocritical. Fertig conveys a palpable bereavement. The dream was always flawed but now it's crumbling, maybe beyond repair.

But there's an irony. This gorgeous-to-see-and-hold book, hand sewn luscious paper, tipped in photographs with embossed cover, was made on Salt Spring by the private literary press which Mona and her husband operate. Maybe that's one answer to entropy: support Beauty "clear as the future,"; regrowing with her, restoratively creative.

-- by Hannah Main-van der Kamp