Walking into the Night Sky

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Lyn King is an essentially lyric poet who savours the moment, although
often through the pastel skeins of memory. Walking into the Night Sky,
her second book of poetry, contains mostly personal lyrics of family,
nature, and the vagaries of love and friendship. Only in two short
sequences, and in a couple of poems that last longer than her normal
single page, does the speaker take on a fictional substance and step
away from the putative author.

The volume offers a number of well-crafted conventional lyrics. King
writes in a fairly standard-free verse, generally hovering between three
and four stresses per line; as a result, many of her line breaks feel
arbitrary, sometimes indicating a pause, at others sliding through an
enjambment. Nevertheless, most of the poems provide a sense of intense
perception or feeling, and there are a number of neatly imagistic
moments.

King’s rhetoric is quite romantic, with an urge toward metaphors and
similes of the natural world. Oddly, in the two sequences on what seems
to be an affair, in which the protagonist seems separate from the usual
poet-figure of the poems, a carefully wrought minimalism achieves even
greater emotional power, not least due to the occasional savage drop
into idiomatic speech. And “Just After,” a startling observation of
two other women suddenly enraged, captures anger and its aftermath
succinctly.

On the whole, Walking into the Night Sky will satisfy most readers of
contemporary lyric poetry. Lyn King has a good eye and ear, and, at her
best, the ability to pare events down to their bare bones.