Left Fields

by Jeanette Lynes

Left Fields , Jeanette Lynes' second collection of poetry with Wolsak and Wynn, consolidates her reputation for writing clear-eyed, accesible and deadly funny poetry. Her first book, A Woman Along on the Aitkokan Highway , immediately struck a chord in the minds of readers and writers of poetry "With nimble imagination and a humour that is tough and vulnerable as the heart of country and western, Jeanette Lynes' poems speak in their own sharply tanged and quite unignorable voice." ? Don McKay. In her first book she introduced us to a difficult childhood in southern Ontario; in Left Fields she revisits the solid, angry/loving bond with her mother, the attitudes she adopts as weapons against the world, and the left fields of her childhood, a landscape she never really left, but carries with her as a snail carries her house on her back. Poems such as "The Icicle Hunter" highlight her tough-tender style, with its contagious humour.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Jeanette Lynes is an award-winning author and has published half a dozen collections of her poetry, as well as both appearing in and editing several anthologies. The Factory Voice is her first published work of fiction.

She has served in writer-in-residence positions in Saskatoon and Dawson Creek, BC. She holds a Ph.D in English from York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine.

Jeanette spent six years working in Thunder Bay before taking her current position as an English professor at St. Francis Xavier University where she is the campus newspaper editor.

She currently lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

From the author:

I've always loved to write. When I was growing up on a farm in Ontario, I made newspapers of local goings-on in the community: for example, 'Mrs. MacTavish Gets Smashing New Easter Bonnet'. I drew the boxes around the little stories and everything, just like a real newspaper.

When I was in high school, I worked in a factory one summer; I've written about this in a poem called "Hairnets and Giblets," from my first book of poetry. My factory experience was brief but made a deep impression on me, especially the various loyalties and allegiances within the workplace, and how a factory becomes a kind of micro-world unto itself.

I've always been fascinated by how people interact with each other and a fiction project like The Factory Voice allowed me the space to explore this fascination.

When I lived in Thunder Bay during the 1990s, I was involved in an project based on Canadian Car and Foundry, the factory in former-day Fort William, that made war planes. The project involved interviewing ladies who had worked on the line during the war. Their stories never left me, and around 2001, I began to imagine their lives in the aviation plant, and thus began The Factory Voice.