The Deep North

While reading about epic adventures and intriguing mysteries, we often forget about the beauty of poetry. Bronwyn Lea’s compilation of poems, The Deep North, breathes meaning into the mundane intricacies of everyday life.

In an introductory note by one of Lea’s colleagues, Paul Kane, he writes, “So many of Lea’s poems detail failures… that one expects a poetry of despair or bitterness, of a wounded and wounding irony that defends the self against an impinging world.” Instead, the poems seem, not hopeful in their depiction of failure, but almost resigned, in that the writer is moving on without looking back.

In her poem “Christmas Day Cuzco, Peru,” Lea writes about trying to wake her partner. He has sunburn, and she writes about peeling a layer of his sunburned skin off. By the end of the poem, the imagery hints at the writer struggling to peel back layers of his self and uncover what is inside. You know that she is not speaking literally, but the depiction is gruesome, nonetheless.

If you read only one book of poetry this year, let it be this one. Lea’s voice is fresh, modern, and beautiful as she holds a magnifying glass to life’s little failures.