lousy explorers
by Laisha Rosnau
Gibbons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2009, ISBN 978-0-88971-230-0, 80 pp., $17.95 paper.

This is Laisha Rosnau's second book of poetry under the Nightwood Editions imprint, and having reviewed her first, I would say she is continuing along the same arc in a more experienced way. Her keen sense of observation remains undiminished, and its subsequent translation to her verse elicits a wide range of responses from the reader.

She writes wryly and with confidence. In "Look At Us: 1972" she reminisces, I presume, about her mother's "marriage similar in ways,/ different in most others" (10) as one half of the bookend to "Look At Us: 2007" about her own marriage, concluding with the exact same two lines: "Nothing was worse than then,/ nothing was better. I had my moods." (11 & 61) Moods of better and worse, because only the particulars change. Rosnau has acquired an acceptance of "how it is" while remaining fiercely active in how she wants it to be.

The poem following "Look At Us: 1972" has the poet returning from the night forest to her mother's orgasmic groans coming from the upstairs window ("sleep is tricky in the house . . .") (12). This comic embarrassment quickly morphs into a young woman's unwavering glare at her father. In "Subtle Mutations" she writes in second-person voice a heartbreaking poem in its obvious truth and anger.

You never lived inside his body--no shared blood or mucous,
no rip in him where you emerged. You are linked instead
by code stamped with dominance, subtle mutations. (14)

The relationship can be abandoned in the ditch like a broken-down car, but call it an improvement over their ability once to kill each other. The bulk of these poems are ones of domestic relationships, deftly written. Detail and moment, the perennially asked questions that remain unanswered, define the sensibility of her poetry.

In "Part Open" the surreptitious pleasure of eating ice cream out of the carton provides the visual we understand, and have undertaken once or twice in our own past. Rosnau knows which images to spin out longer, and which ones we can not only imagine, but veritably feel in her writing. "Something in the car/ clicks when it cools . . ." and "The Fraser cuts cold air through town . . ." (32) She writes of ditches, margins, discards--life in transit, in perpetual motion.

The title poem is one that at first glance seems so different from the others in this book. The voice is larger than individual experience (third person plural), and the theme commands more metaphorical weight than do the other poems. We've dammed a river, and sunk our homes-- "we make a mess/ of things, strip and exploit, squint blindly at stars,/ block what should flow" (58). We sink deeper as the "dream pines" rise to the surface. I find the poem comforting in its strength of truth, and insistence of nature. Perhaps, on reflection, that is what exactly at base fires Rosnau's poetry.

Andrew Vaisius is a writer and childcare worker living in Morden, Manitoba.