New Blue Distance, The

Lynes distills Canada into poetry; curling, spring in Saskatoon and grape vines in Antigonish weave the country into the book. Lynes reveals a deep understanding of the country we live in and gives voices to this insight in her trademark wry and endearing style. Yet, this is her most serious collection so far, and readers everywhere will find themselves deeply identifying with a woman who “… with somewhat clouded mind, with fond / cautious affection for the farmer’s wife I never was, / I stand, brush in hand, ready for ice and whatever may befall me.” As she steps out onto the curling rink.

AUTHOR

Jeanette Lynes

Jeanette Lynes teaches English at St. Francis Xavier University. Her articles on Atlantic-Canadian literature have appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature; Wascana Review; The River Review (Maine); A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (edited by Riegel and Wyile, University of Alberta Press); and Canadian Children’s Literature. Jeanette Lynes’ first collection of poems was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 1999.

Reviews

“Her language is rich and precise, and she’s adept at the art of storytelling. It’s grad-school life through the lens of a farm-girl history, and both aspects of Lynes’s poetic obsessions bring an authenticity to the texts offered up.” – The Globe and Mail

“The poems in Jeanette Lynes’ fifth collection aren’t sombre, twilit meditations but lively narratives on a variety of subjects, including her rural upbringing, family ties and the expectations and constraints placed on women by society.” – The Toronto Star

“Jeanette Lynes is a brilliant storyteller. She borrows, steals, shapes, creates, and tells a thousand little stories in her new book The New Blue Distance?. She gives us the Canadian cultural and personal landscape in little slices of story.” – Canadian Literature