Brilliant Women Inc

       When I read books of poems I am always listening. I want to know the poet has an ear. If they don't seem to, then I become perplexed. I wonder why they write poetry, that ancient oral/aural art form, that word music. Lisa Martin has an ear. Listen to some lines from "Bare Posts, Barbed Wire" that some may consider old-fashioned in their resonances: "Why riff so low, so long/ over slow/land and the horses'/hung heads?...why dote on the closed old road?" The preponderance of O sounds and the predominance of one-syllable words create a mournfulness, an energy essentially muted as it is in grieving. This is a tone that rings through many of the poems in Nighthawks, lyrics that confront the suffusing moods, rather than the instances of rupture, that emerge from divorce, deaths, moments children detach, recognitions of fissures between oneself and the natural world. The titular poem, a longish one in parts of varying lengths, closes out the book, an anxious...

         Yet another gorgeous Gaspereau book with textured cover stock, a stark lithograph, an exquisite font. All that Tonya Lailey's moving poems deserve as they seek to enter the memory of a farm, a vineyard, a time of parental labour, immigrant workers, the rise and fall of crops over the course of decades in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I don't, as a rule, review first books of poetry here on Brilliant Women Inc, but I am making an exception for Lot 23 as I have now read it twice with much pleasure and have invited Lailey to read at my Impromptu series for traveling poets this June.       Lot 23 is divided into four segments like plowed fields: "Concessions," an introduction of the book's themes, "Lines," attending more to farming and including several descriptive listing pieces on owned vehicles and familiar roads, "End Posts," which enlarges this subject matter, reaching back to her grandparents and to a list of creatures who died on an...