Nighthawks by Lisa Martin (University of Alberta Press, 2026)

     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 meditation (within the frame of a Hopper painting, recollections of Eliot's Prufrock) on the words "new" and "now" that veers like a bird of prey amid hauntings: her ex's wife's research speciality (the hawk's "peents" and "booms"), her children's persistent re-interpretations, questions about the future, the need for trust. I love the last lines with their rhyming couplet of mark/dark though "unlit" to describe the latter noun seems redundant. 

    The book is divided into three unnamed sections of roughly equivalent length, though the first segment is dominated by a Shakespearean sonnet sequence called "Typology" on the well-known Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (where your personality can be summed up as a combination of eight possible types, organized in four letter codes). As an aficionado of forms, I always enjoy reading contemporary examples of a fairly strict rhyme scheme and meter that deals with modern subject matter. The sonnets are strongest when the lines are enjambed, allowing many rhymes to tweak their exactitude with a slight slant of vowel or a one syllable/two syllable echo, as in these first four lines of "INTP" : 

            "Someday I'd like to grow old with someone

            like you - drinking wine in a house crammed full 

            of musty books. Dust motes in rays of sun.

            Vinyl on the turntable, old needle...."  

    The metre varies between iambic and trochaic pentameter and these rhythmic substitutions in end words prevent the sonnets from falling into traditional fixtures. Play resides within them, discovery of self and others. There is also an ekphrastic piece ("Take Down"), an "Ars Poetica," and an "Elegy" that questions the genre's purpose. In the second section, the powerful poem in couplets, "When there is no remedy for it," stood out for me, as a piece that twins the discovery of problematic moles with the need to dig up invasive bellflowers in Edmonton: "Meanwhile, tubers flourish in the dark,/white and erratic, lines of light/on a screen mark the unwanted spot."  This part contains more poems in fragmented and numbered questions, memories, musings. "If love is a habitat - is desire/a felt exile?" Martin asks in "The Point" and the reader can linger on such embedded queries. At times, endings can fall into flattened platitude, as in "Left Breast with Lymph" that dwindles into the abstract wordiness of: "which is what/can happen sometimes/even after all -/ even when we are afraid." More often there's an attention to detail that is reminiscent of Anne Compton that moves one, as in the ekphrastic poem in the third section, "Beaverhill Lake" that starts: "It isn't winter now, carving that empty space/into my lungs and the alders' bare branches. Along the barbed/wire fence/that stretches, post and wire..." An homage to Don McKay in "Field Guide to the Birds of Alberta" is also here, the flaying of a deer in floating stanzas ("Assertions of Likeness") and recognitions of how we allow symbols to carry our bonds with others ("Objects of a Marriage"), the speaker plaintive as she utters: "How could I not, then,/love you, who offered me/what I had to believe/was tenderness?" even if it was towards a bird more directly than herself. 

    Throughout Nighthawks' melding of observations, queries, jokes, philosophies and emotion, Lisa Martin keeps returning to the way we all accord meaning to words that, perhaps later in life, after experiences have served as tremors, we will need to readjust to, shift, shake up. As in the poem about bird watching, she knows she must "learn to listen more skillfully" and acknowledge that despite all learning there will always be something one cannot "recognize," a lacuna that trembles at the centre of all we now are.