Review by Deborah K Frontiera
Lake Superior is a random, unpredictable lake, so it is not surprising that Lynn Domina’s poetry book Inland Sea has a random order. You can open it anywhere and read one or two, pondering and digesting them for a while before flipping to another page. The last thing a reader would want to do is start at page one and read straight through. It wouldn’t be good that way. The book is a buffet of lovely poems, and one should start with dessert. There are three parts to the volume, and each one has some poems directly involving the lake and others with various settings, which is okay. Because one can sit on some part of the shore of the “Big Lake” and think about other places, too. Domina mixes science and emotion and everything into a giant salad bowl. Here are a few of my favorite bites.
The opening, “Shoreline” lets us see the lake through each season in nine stanzas filled with imagery and texture.
Then, these lines at the end of “Field Work” resonated especially:
I’d set out to resolve, to know
rather than know about, decline the exotic,
choose instead these spruce, sparrows, coneflowers
I pass each day.
There is also much to ponder in “Does a Star Know It’s a Star?” The title is a question a child asked his father as they were walking through the isles of a hardware store, and the poet began to think of the universe and the science she learned as a child.
These lines of deep personification in “Blue Hope,” made me feel like I know the color blue:
Blues knows that touching your lover’s skin
feels like watching a heron
lift off, reveling in its slow
elegant strength. Blue imagines
wings, muscles carrying it
skyward until it becomes indistinct,
freely watching, catching
specks of itself
flash below.
I felt that the ultimate tribute to the book’s title lay in “No Dinosaur Ever Saw Superior” which explains the lake’s short geological life, within which the poet quotes that there are 3, 000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water! Another poem full of science in Part II, “Do Carnivorous Plants Experience Hunger?” which educates us through poetic images. And this line form “Wetlands” adds art to the mix: “Through the rain, she said the landscape/ looked pointillist.”
I felt like was on the scene in the details of smoke in “Chant to Lift Up the Soul of George Floyd”, even though that poem has nothing to do with Lake Superior—one of those random things one ponders while sitting of a shore somewhere. But in the poem the “randomness” is what makes the point, no matter which side of that event one stood on. Further on, I got the shivers reading “Classroom”, because even though I am a retired kindergarten teacher, I “knew” kids like that.
“Words from the Past” came close to home, too, because I’ve listened to many people whisper at funerals and have questions I wish I had asked one of my aunts. Echoes of other places and times are surrounded by bears, the lake, trees and forests. Are they “off” theme? Or an intricate part of the randomness the poet sets up? Then there is the great personification of language in “Literacy” where the poet states: “…consonants, diphthongs plunging from your mouth the way a long slide/ drops you into the community pool.”
The opening poem, “Shoreline,” and the ending poem, “The Road to Happiness,” create a metaphorical shore around the randomness of what lies between, but readers shouldn’t miss a single line of it in Lynn Domina’s Inland Sea.
Inland Sea by Lynn Domina
ISBN 978-1-639803-66-8, Kelsay Books, 2023
