April 2009
80 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-31-8
$17.00
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.
Reviews
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Review (Christopher Levenson, Journal of Canadian Poetry, vol. 26, 1/8/2011) “It is impossible not to admire her skill, her unerring mastery of colloquial speech, and her flair for infiltrating certain kinds of popular culture.”
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Throats & Claws (Emily Wall, Canadian Literature, 4/5/2011) “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.”
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The New Blue Distance (Anna Mioduchowska, Prairie Fire, 10/15/2010) “The answer lies in Lynes's linguistic energy, her intelligent wit, gift of observation, and eye for startling justaposition. She knits together elements of pop culture, current events, aspects of life of a contemporary Canadian woman...”
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Review (Karin Cope, The Dalhousie Review, 5/1/2010) “As one might expect, Jeanette Lynes' The New Blue Distance, her fifth collection, seamlessly mixes popular cultural references and poetic history, dosing both with irony.”
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Poets who take you to school (Zoe Whittall, The Globe and Mail, 9/7/2009) “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.”
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Robust humour survives romantic woes (Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star, 7/12/2009) “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.”
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The New Blue Distance (Candace Fertile, Quill & Quire, 5/1/2009) “The most successful poems are intensely Canadian in subject matter and setting. "My Mother's Feet" is a lovely paean to a hard-working farmer's wife.”
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