“The Fleece Era” separates sheep from goats

Joanna Lilley

The Fleece Era

Brick Books, 2014

100 pp. ISBN 978-1-926829-89-0

www.brickbooks.ca

If there’s a special afterlife for poets, both good and bad, Joanna Lilley should find herself in the most pleasant of post-bodily states. Seldom does a writer manage to weave such an assortment of different tales into a unified whole, and though these poems are not directly connected by sequence or linear storyline, they manage to convey what it means to be human and interacting with others of varying degree of dysfunction and with an increasingly bipolar natural environment.  

Lilley’s lines are consistently well-crafted yet remain unpredictable. Her language is the perfect medium between the sparse and the ornate, and The Fleece Era would easily fit on shelves containing both academic narratives and volumes of people's poetry.

The broad appeal of this, Joanna Lilley’s first collection of poetry, lies not only in its accessible diction but in its easy-to-relate-to subject matter – most of us at one time or another finding ourselves in similar situations as described in these various vignettes.

There are so many poems in The Fleece Era that could count toward my list of favourites that the challenge to relay them all in a single review would be overly daunting and not really feasible so I’ll convey a few of the highlights that left me both envious of Lilley’s talent as a poet and lamenting that I’m presently (and will be in the future) unable to duplicate the level of artistry present in her metaphors and the images that are well-timed, pertinent to each piece, but never overblown or scribed to wow adjudicators of CanLit awards.

In terms of sheer personal and emotive quality, “If I Had Children” was one of this volume’s most moving episodes:

If I Had Children

If I had children

I would have to stop

reading the book I’m reading

and stop writing the book

I’m writing and stop worrying

about how much sleep

I don’t get and I, who cannot listen

to the weather forecast all the way through,

would have to pay attention

for the rest of my life to the rest of theirs.

Every night, I would lay them

under a ceiling and have to remember

to keep them warmer

in winter than in the summer.

Every day, I would have to feed them

food that isn’t food

that’s killing me. Every night,

I would lay my hand on

their hearts to feel the beat

I take too long to find behind

my own fleshy breast, my wadded ribs.

And eventually I would have to explain

why grown-ups can’t sit at the table

politely like children can, why

adults argue, tell each other lies.

Eventually, I would admit

that people firing guns and dropping

bombs do have a choice.

As I was dying, all I would have

to bequeath would be a million pounds

of greenhouse gas emissions.

As I was dying, I’d forget

I’d promised myself never to confess

I nearly didn’t have them

because the human race was almost over

and it was clear who was going to win.

© 2014 Joanna Lilley

An “environmental poem” has never resonated so personally and become so human, eschewing the pitfalls of blatant didacticism that entrap many well-meaning poets attempting to write of our species’ incessant harm to our planet.

Familial relations and a pervading theme of loss resonate in a number of these poems, a notable example that can be found in “Aunt”:

Aunt

I stand in late light

at my nephew’s attic window

as he sleeps. Below,

his mother weeps.

I leak the powerlessness of aunts.

I can’t fling words far enough

for a sister to catch.

Even easy ones:

he’s not coming back.

I’m going to chuck what I have left

out the window, go home

and start a college fund.

Abstract nouns tap like rain.

Proper nouns thwack like hail.

Verbs – wet snow – won’t settle.

No more words. No weather.

Only the moon, which

will stay a comma

this entire night.

© 2014 Joanna Lilley

Lilley takes note of her surroundings and the individuals inhabiting them with a precision and detail that the rest of us, unless mindfully attuned, tend to ignore and as a result fail to discover insights into everyday events and people that the author opens to us with the adeptness of a veteran practitioner of Zen.

Notes At A Concert

I hear notes before the bow

touches strings, notes in the air

around the violinist’s wrists,

in the space inside his shirt

as a shoulder lifts.

He’s tapered, flared and frantic,

the oddest looking, yet the only

one with ironed creases in his trousers.

The guitarist’s mouth is easy-smile.

His stomach swells below his black roll-neck:

good wine, seafood, the occasional

game of squash. He’s San Francisco.

His slapping hands

look as soft as a solicitor’s

but there must be calluses.

The double bass player’s fingers are thick sticks,

his forehead broad. His lips curl

towards his nostrils; he’s Rossetti’s Beatrice –

he has the hair.

The lights go up.

I was in good company:

the woman who didn’t give me a job,

next to the trainer who thinks my dog has depression.

The man who wants the government

to stop killing wolves sits behind the painter

who pulls her feet to the seat like a child.

She’s here each time I come,

trying, like me, to pay attention to genius.

© 2014 Joanna Lilley

English by birth and having spent the first 39 of her 47 years in the U.K., Joanna Lilley is a fine adopted member of a new Canadian poetry (having lived here since 2006, presently residing in the Yukon). It will be exciting to see what observations she presents to us the next time around, and how her first decade in Canada has affected her exceptional poetics and storytelling.

– Andreas Gripp