Chantal Kreviazuk's "Surrounded": the circle of grief

Chantal Kreviazuk is probably my favourite Canadian singer and, though she's been around since the early 90s, that's a claim I make based on the extraordinary impact of a single song & video. The details of her successful career are fairly well documented, with her recording, song-writing and soundtracks successes known here and internationally.

She is a national treasure (though lately fading). But, again, I doubt I'd be saying any of this were it not for her "Surrounded", a beautifully lyrical and psychologically complex portrayal (the best I've seen) of grief. The YouTube version is, in fact, a poem. Music, movement, and setting are a mantra. A circle (an oft-repeated word) in which she's caught forever. Even when I don't see her, I envisage the singer repeating (and having repeated many times before) this terrible ritual: having to repeat, in fact, in order to live. Antigone is the pattern of Kreviazuk's song.

A young woman's tragedy that neither she nor the consolations of lyrics and dance can name but which is to be seen in the piano's broken rhapsody & the wound of death's first time. The figures in her eyes are hard to watch, and the blind window & amulet, the bomb and toppling libraries. But she knows we can and we do, even 13 years after the song's first appearance. She'll never go through this alone.