lovingly reviewed by rob mclennan

I’m delighted to encounter St. John’s, Newfoundland writer Jennifer May Newhook’s Last Hours (St. John’s NL: Riddle Fence Publishing, 2024), one of a trio of full-length poetry debuts—alongside Tia McLennan’s Familiar Monsters of the Flood and Danielle Devereaux’s The Chrome Chair: Poems—produced through the recently-established publishing adjunct of St. John’s, Newfoundland literary journal Riddle Fence. 

Clustered across six numbered sections, Newhook’s poems in Last Hours are shaped as a blend between pointillist narratives and staccato lyrics, carved and crafted with a deceptive ease out of communicative language, almost as a vocal extension of her Newfoundland landscape. “Everywhere, in every emerald lane,” she writes, as part of “Last of the Lilacs,” “carmine clematis pinwheels spin, / and starry asters wheel. Saliva divinorum, // allium, and pink, bouffant peonies explode / over lapped olive and turquoise clapboard; golden / chains hang molten from the branches.” Her language is simultaneously liquid and the stone the waves crash against, providing, as required, both smooth lyric and jagged outcrop. “We too / have sewn / the story of / the leather men.” she writes, as part of “Goodnight Moon.” A bit further on, offering: “I’ve shrunk / since we last met; / my limbs have grown / painfully thin, and I’d hate / for you to see them.” 

As I’ve suggested prior on Newfoundland poetry: it is interesting to predominantly encounter a landscape through the lens of its writers, and other recent Newfoundland-specific offerings would include the intimacy of Allie Duff’s full-length poetry debut, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), and the very different passages and landscapes of Michael Crummey’s Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022), Matthew Hollett’s Optic Nerve: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2023) and Adam Beardsworth’s No Place Like (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023). Each of these writers carries a very clear and extensive view of their version of Newfoundand, fully aware that any sense of place is multi-faceted and evolving. On her part, Newhook’s articulation of “place” gathers a cast of characters and corners as much of the landscape as fog, fishing or Muskrat Falls, and the collection is very much shaped across an expansive vista, twenty-three poems that provide a narrative arc across the length and breadth of St. John’s, Newfoundland, across myths and recollections, history and the immediately present. “Pondside,” she writes, as part of “Spring Is in the Gut,” a poem subtitled “(a meditation on unplanned pregnancy at advanced / maternal age, with brass band),” “lost mitts bloom— / fat, unmatched woollen / birds hung in low / tree branches. One / underwater, unfortunate, / all gull-unstrong / and long unravelling. / Red, like guts.”

Newhook shapes, thoughtfully and carefully, the most delightful and intriguing lyric sentences and stretches. Listen as the poem “Celestial Bodies,” for example, begins: “The moon came up / like a half-peeled orange / over the sea— / started a racket / in the back seat / of the pickup truck.” She writes of politics and the distances of time, specific settings and recollected stories, all held together through a lens of deep and abiding familiarity. As she writes, as part of the poem “Re: Muskrat Falls,” subtitled “(cc: Ball, Bennett, Furey, et al.)”:

These poems are vibrant, and evocative, rich with texture, across language and landscape, even through an offering of complicated love for her home city, and home province. “Signal Hill,” she writes, as part of “Morning in the Cauldron,” “the Southside, / and the City of St. John’s— / that sagging amphitheatre of steaming, canted, / mansard roofs, stepping and leaning and tumbling / the steep, downtown slope / to the water. // Don’t pray / for this poor man’s coliseum, / the centuries of sad, Victoria shades, / the flaking marine paint.”

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is full-time with the wee girls he shares with writer Christine McNair. His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press), will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He edits the chapbook press above/ground press and the online journal periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics, among other schemes.