Lot 23 by Tonya Lailey (Gaspereau Press, 2024)

  

    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 and around the farm, and the long slender poem "Farm Photo," a fierce address of and to the migrants from Jamaica (Jeffrey, Vivian) who worked the farm: their labour, immigration issues, diet ("...peas and rice/in akee and salt fish/in jerk pork/and pepper pot soup"), oppositions to colonial attitudes, resilience. 

    I am always compelled by books that draw me so utterly inside their material, even when I may have little interest in the subject. This is one of poetry's, and indeed, all memorable writing's, powers; to fascinate and even educate a reader on an issue or idea or aspect of history they might otherwise dismiss. Ask me if I want to read about farms (even about wineries ;) and I won't necessarily answer yes. Ask me if these lines: "...Concord's engrossed blueberries in well-hung clusters, the/fecund largess of the grey-green leaves, their furry undersides, the/slightly devious curl inward along leaf edges and their "slip-skin"..." make me curious about "dominant ester[s]" in grapes and I will reply absolutely! Or if these anaphoric, alliterative ones from "The Shed" : "a jury-rigged place/a jerry can place/...a place twine spends time in spools/a sagging glass planes place..." make me want to enter this land in my imagination, entranced by such small songs, well, yes also. 

Amid lyrics, Lailey also experiments not only with the aforementioned list pieces, but also recipes for a farm, translations of cultivars, prose, couplets and typographic shifts. O and some delightful onomatopoeic resonances: " -- crickets, whoa, honk, knock, knock, whoa, clang...a bird-banger squeal-crack. And the sunlight curls west, west, west --blurring all our lines." She has a wonderful ear for enjambment too even when I might question the all-over-the-place stanzaic appearance of some poems. At times, endings fall a bit flat ("...but I know/she knows/something's up./ She'll know/when she sees it") and perhaps an over-circling back through the material happens in the understandable quest to be completist with this essential narrative, but Lot 23 never disappoints in its aim to find the poem in rare tales of sweat, persistence, methods of grafting and planting, the slow loss of a way of being in the world and how, through low-paid slog, this kind of life can remain viable. I'll return to the prefatory poem to close out this all-too-brief foray into Tonya Lailey's memorable Lot 23 where, she writes, poems and farming are similar as "both involve/waiting/for what/makes itself/known."