Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems

by Jeanette Lynes

Winner of the 2016 Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award In this collection Jeanette Lynes' follows in the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid . In Bedlam Cowslip , she turns her attention to the life and work of John Clare, the great Victorian poet of the countryside, one of England's greatest working-class bards. In these poems, the Romantic world of Clare, strewn with wild flowers and dizzy with birdsong, is visited by a new, postmodern voice, and the conversation that ensues across a dozen decades is profound and dazzling. Painstakingly researched and deftly crafted, the poems share Clare's loves, ambitions, rages and failures. With lines that echo the sharpness of Dorothy Livesay and the richness of Roo Borson, Lynes writes of madness, scarce paper and of the intense attention Clare brought to his world. In this book Lynes has created an uplifting poetic biography on a bright poetic star that has been rising for over a century.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2015

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.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich work bringing across a variety of emotions and human experiences. Each poem builds on the previous ones and Lynes' clever writing sounds just right.

I received a copy of this book for free through Goodreads Giveaways.

[Samantha Gunning]

I won this book via Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. I received a paperback copy.