Culverts, Brenda Schmidt tells us, were first called to her imagination when she was a child. In and around their steel dark openings she played and took risks. In the daring poetry and prose of Culverts beneath the Narrow Road, the risk-taking continues. In her journeys, she asked people from all walks of life – construction workers, farmers, biologists, writers, musicians – about their culvert stories. Their recollections, both dark and light, brought to light her own, giving another sense of the connections we share and the way stories emerge and flow.

The collection is rich with both these imaginings and stories where events like “A bunch of us put a culvert across the road so the cops couldn’t get us.” or “He crawled in and got stuck. / Couldn’t move forward / couldn’t move back,” set in motion experiences as real to anyone growing up rural as they might imagine. Culverts are real events in peoples’ lives, but in Schmidt’s world they are also catalysts for transformation in nature, waiting for metaphor to burst from their openings.

For Schmidt, the use of culverts can be a source of defense or a source of danger in everyday life, sweeping children into them during floods, providing temporary graves for the murdered, and luring the unsuspecting into the dangerous riddle of traversing them. For those, like Schmidt, who lives among culverts, they also mark dates of road building, and establish the history of railroads and progress of neighbours who must move water on the land. They are fixed reference points, their corrugated, riveted steel purposed by men and machines, but repurposed by nature and others. Some are as big as a house, others as small as a rabbit run. Some offer the best hiding places for all things legal and illegal, some provide astounding acoustics for guns or guitars, and it all seems to help to measure childhood adventure in hundreds of ways.

In resourceful adaptability, these often witty, and informative poems chart and define our complex relationships with the unassuming culvert, and through them, we are entertained and enlightened by Schmidt’s keep perceptions.