Lichen Bright

Kim Fahner teaches English and history at Marymount Academy in Sudbury,
Ontario.

This debut collection by Orillia-based poet Lauren Carter is clean and
pared down. Recurring motifs in Carter’s carefully crafted poems
include bodies of water, sailors, the power of memory, and the push of
the future. Even if memories of the past aren’t always untarnished,
Carter finds purpose in her past and uses that direction to move forward
in life and in poetry. This theme is aptly reflected in “Widow,”
when she writes that “seasons move around me, one / into the next.”
Despite the pressing nature of loss in our lives, there is no stopping
the motion of life. Even in the face of pain or death, we are compelled
to move on.

There is a sense, too, of finding our present and future selves in our
individual and collective pasts. In “After Tres Sargentos,” Carter
writes of “a past / knotted in language / like sunlight seen looking
up / through a lake.” A male figure in “Palmerston Breakfast”
“digs up the present / to find the past.” “Masochist” is about
the ways in which humans are constantly haunted by the ghost of the
past: “I blink and a past life / is caught in my eye like sleep-dust,
/ something to be plucked away.” There is an archaeology of memory
here, one that draws you almost inexplicably into the poetry and makes
you contemplate your own history.

Connoisseurs of good poetry will find much to satisfy them in this
stunning collection.