A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway

Melanie Marttila is a Sudbury-based freelance writer and writing
consultant.

This first collection of poetry by Jeanette Lynes contains some very
promising material. A combination of bittersweet reflection, humor, and
insight, the collection is both charming and thought-provoking.

Lynes travels from the personal to the universal with ease, inviting
the reader on a sentimental journey that yields surprising results. Life
in Northern Ontario, 4H clubs, long hours spent in travel for the sake
of academic pursuits, lighthearted disdain for cultural icons like
Martha Stewart and Bill Gates—all of these puzzle pieces fit into the
reader’s memory and help to bring Lynes’s bigger picture home.

Television staples such as The Lawrence Welk Show and Ponderosa become
occasions for deeper reflections: “We had no idea / forests were
filling / with agent orange while we watched / Lawrence’s world, / all
go / up / in bubbles.” Titles like “I was a Teen-aged
Shoe-Mutilator” catch the attention, allowing the slight twist within
each poem to take the reader by surprise. When Lynes writes, “I tell
myself / by shoveling snow I am / clearing a path to / the forces of
good,” the reader can also imagine “something / extraordinary”
resulting from ordinary tasks.

Even the absent has meaning. In “1969,” Lynes writes, “If I was
not thirteen / during that first sally / to the moon’s surface / I
should have been,” and Mount Rainier on a cloudy day becomes the
occasion for “Meditations on a Missing Mountain.”

Every seemingly commonplace event in these poems leads to insight, and
to meaning. This is the gift of accessible poetry, and it is something
that Lynes is very adept at. A Woman Alone is a good collection of
poetry for just about any reader, and therefore just about any library.