Fault Line

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Laura Lush, winner of the Banff’s Centre’s Bliss Carman Award for
Poetry, writes poems that

are spare, intense, and intimate. In her latest collection, one can also
find craftsmanship, vitality, and originality, if not always in the same
poem.

In “Spring,” “the small-bodied cherries / cling to the trees like
suicide attempts.” Violence is described with sardonic eloquence in
“Song”: “Just touch all the new black and blue parts.” “Dolly
and Rose” humorously views the lives

of two spirited women who refuse to allow age and ill-health to dampen
their youthful spirits; these two “Old flappers that strung / hearts
like beads” now happily settle for booze and blackjack. “Work”
describes the antics of absentee and rebellious workers. “Heigh Ho!
Heigh Ho! Off to work / they didn’t go” expresses the alienation
that unites the “no-shows” and the “goof-offs.”

Since Lush has taught English in Japan for four years, one might expect
that “Washizu Poems,” named after a Japanese lakeside town, would
all be set there; however, only “Komachu’s” and “Mama-San”
are. Perhaps the rest were merely written overseas, a speculation that
prompts the cliché about the traveler who transports himself on his
journeys.