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Bud Osborn and Richard Tetrault, Signs of the Times (Vancouver: Paneficio Studios and Anvil Press, 2005)

Reviewed by Sandy Cameron
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 7


On the cover of Signs of the Times is a print of Olaf Solheim, drawn by Richard Tetrault from a photograph of Olaf at Solheim Place. Olaf died at the age of 87 after he was thrown out of the Patricia Hotel to make room for Expo 86 tourists. He had been a logger, and had lived at that hotel for about forty years. It was his home when he wasn’t in the camps. “The spark went out of him after the eviction. He just stopped living,” Dr. John Blatherwick, Vancouver’s medical health officer, said.

In his drawing, Richard has given Olaf the power of an Old Testament prophet. Olaf’s body, slightly hunched over, and his large hands, suggest great strength, and his soul-searing, accusing stare challenges the people and the system that caused his death. As the 2010 Winter Olympics approach, Olaf doesn’t want residents of the Downtown Eastside to die the way he died. “We are a community of prophets in the Downtown Eastside,” Bud Osborn has written. So do Richard’s prints and Bud’s poems complement each other.

Bud’s poems and Richard’s prints make visible what those in power try to cover up—the despair, poverty and homelessness of our times, and the courage, endurance and dignity of those who resist an unjust system. In the first poem in the book, Bud writes:

across North America
hand held pieces of cardboard
crudely lettered
or painstakingly printed
express
the lived poetry of poverty

no home
no job
no money
no food
and name
preventable diseases
untreated
because of inability
to pay for relief or healing

signs

reaching from the Atlantic
to the Pacific

But people resist the injustice of a soul-destroying system. In the poem “Oscar”, we meet Oscar from El Salvador. He has suffered much, but he can still

... burst forth
with a passionate call to action
a call for us to protest
for jobs
and housing
and decriminalization
and to protest against
the violence of the police

This poem, “Oscar”, is printed in the book in both English and Spanish.

In the poem “Theology from the Outer Darkness”, Bud writes of overwhelming suffering and intense pain, as though a person were on a cross—the cross being a weapon used by the Roman Empire to keep people down.

Many people turn away from a person in anguish because the pain is more than they can bear, but Bud, who has experienced a lot of suffering, listens as a man tells him his story. Bud does not turn away, and Richard, in the power and compassion of his drawings, does not turn away either.

The man telling the story in the poem

... stretches out his arms again
and makes the sounds
of crucifixion
and says
“the pain
the pain”

On the cross a person is furthest away from the unconditional compassion we call God, and at the same time is closest to that Compassion. This is a mystery. We know about crosses in the Downtown Eastside.

In his struggle to express his anguish, the man reaches out to another human being. Grieving leads to speech: “my family is dying right now,” he says to Bud.

Speech leads away from isolated suffering to community—the brotherhood and sisterhood of those who live in pain. The sharing of a story creates a new experience that can help us find the language of hope and resistance. But we have to keep caring, even in the outer darkness. This poem contains great compassion, and in the words of the Russian liturgy, “everyone who comforts another is the mouth of Christ.”

Bud continues on this theme of caring in the poem “No matter how vicious the system is”. He describes how the corporate global economy dehumanizes us:

... I become this system of oppression
I make scapegoats of others
I hate and I resent and I fear and I am greedy
and even when I have called out or cried for help
my voice and my wounds are managed by the system

But Bud remembers:

yet I also bring something else to mind
and therefore I have hope
because of our deep and hidden and oppressed
love for one another
deeper than any economics of greed and madness

It is through this love that we will prevail:

we will overcome because we live differently
than the system intends for us
we live in cooperation and compassion
and we have arisen
and we have come alive
and we are resisting

There are many inspiring poems and prints in this book. “A Binner is a True Spiritual Guide” is here. So is “A New Day”, the poem Bud read at the opening of Insite, North America’s first publicly-supported, supervised injection site. Bud writes, “I dedicate this poem (‘A New Day’) to the many people who laid down their lives to bring about this life-saving and hope-inspiring initiative.”

Signs of the Times is the second book Bud and Richard have done together. The first one, Oppenheimer Park, was published in 1998. In both publications David Bircham did the fine graphic layout and design.