Peppermint Night

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.

Vanna Tessier writes a clean, open-form lyric, usually concentrating on
immediate events or occurrences. She can catch something like a
“moonscar” in a series of sharp little images, and manages a similar
effect with a female road-worker in “construction puzzle.” In many
of the poems, this sharp gaze is enough, and should be. When she tries
too hard to derive some kind of moral, to add that final comment to
bring closure to the poem, it usually takes away rather than adding.
This can happen in poems about other people met in daily life, like the
man with a nicotine habit who pushes ahead of her in a store lineup, or
the young woman who is sold to a geisha house.

Peppermint Night is generally plainspoken, its rhythms those of normal
speech, its images clear and straightforward. The poems cover a wide
range of experience. Tessier has a fine sense of what to leave out, and
the many gaps in the narratives demand a reader’s empathic inference.
While making no big claims for itself, Peppermint Night offers another
version of traditional lyric vision in modern form.