Fortune

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

In Fortune, her fifth collection of poems, Tanis MacDonald confidently
and compassionately captivates the reader through stories of famous
personalities (Einstein, Edison, Auden, Bishop, Dickinson, Tamar, Gustav
Courbet) and recognizable personas (the hunter, the recalcitrant
Catholic school student, the roommate, the husband stealer, the accident
victim, the university student, the scholar, the siren, the trespasser,
the outcast, the waitress, the teacher, parents, children, etc.). She
also tells stories about the weather, good times, bad moments,
relationships, home, heaven, nature, family history, World War I,
Canadian literature, space, mythology, and museums.

The collection’s highlights include poems that connect planets in
space with mythological characters (“The Fortunes”) or with
real-life characters (“Astrophel”), poems about family stories
(“Blacksmith Quartet”), and poems about orphans (“Aliena
Misericordia,” “The Kindness of Strangers,” “Orphines”).

MacDonald draws her readers in through her witty and weighty subject
matter, and through her incredible sense of language and rhythm. Her
linguistic dexterity and poetic ear create highly readable poems that do
not use end rhyme to manufacture rhythm. Instead, she depends on
diction, well-placed line breaks and punctuation, as well as
alliteration and internal rhyme and/or assonance. For example, in “The
Fortunes,” she writes, “The Fortunes serve what’s hot, and /
nothing else. Cross your fingers and swallow. Think small, / recall
…” MacDonald also includes one poem without any punctuation at all
(“Theft”) and several prose poems.

Fortune contains two prize-winning poems: “Arise and Walk,” which
won the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry in 2003, and “Jezebel,” which
won the “Beyond Feminism” Millennial Poem Contest sponsored by Other
Voices in 2000.