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The magic of great writing wells up from a deep sensibility, love of words and flawless craft. Like diamonds cut to reveal the light, few perfectly chosen words can release immense images and evoke profound emotion. Winner of the 2023 Ontario Poetry Society’s Ted Plantos Memorial Award, Pearls of Rain is an exquisite book of poems that unlocks sublime poetic notes of hidden graces inherent in life’s most difficult moments. As Ted Plantos wrote, it is poetry which releases a “light that falling on the book, reveals words that are more than words.”

As gold and silver are purified by fire, so too the human spirit is refined by the anvil of pain. A pearl is spun by the crystallization of a wound within an oyster. The substance is nacre: layers of aragonite and conchiolin that make up the conch’s shell, encapsulating with mother of pearl irritants or parasites entering its sanctum to protect itself. “Each pearl” writes Margot Datz, “is a jewel of wisdom wrestled from the struggle to create infinite insight,” or as Federico Fellini wrote “the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography”.

Indeed, like nacre 3D printing the iridescence of a pearl, poetry reveals in increments the valuable essence of the poet’s experience. Woven with love, joy, sensitivity, pain, grief, and hope into lustre, the poems in this collection are indeed pearls. As in nature’s gems, their clarity beholds a light of profound depth and intricacy. In reading them we are transported into the living realities they expose. As only the finest writing can do, they show and do not tell, evoking in the reader the infinite power of co-creative visualization. The poet’s words become our world. We become connected; the poet’s words a balm for our own soul’s lesions.

The initial poem “Scrapbook” leads us into the collection alerting us to revelations of “family secrets” told as Emily Dickinson would say, slant, not directly, but from a poetic angle, “cropped and bound” as in the images of a scrapbook. In the subsequent two pieces “Hard Landing” and “Everything is Hard,” the image of a woman who “tossed herself like a rag” down the stairs to “a hard landing/ by the front door” is emphasized by the inferred callousness of a man with no compassion, the title repeated in the first stanza, reiterating an unbearable reality. We don’t know who the woman in the poem is, but we assume it is the “she” hurt by the “he” who gives commands “on his list of many”. In “Everything is Hard,” the tally of every hard surface in the home, accentuates and intensifies the uncomfortableness of having to live “here” instead of “in a real home/ where there is love.” We read: “hostility resides here/ his face is hard/ I am surrounded by other hard faces/ my seat is hard/ the one beside me/ no better/ the table we gather around/ the metal appliances we use/ to cook and cool our food/ the floor tiles/ even the carpet/ with its prickly bristles/ that no amount of vacuuming softens.” It is not by chance that the poem “Snapdragons” follows.

Again, there is a “her” we could infer is the poet’s mother or perhaps a surrealist double image of the poet herself, almost as if she is watching herself out of body, de-realized by trauma, looking at the scene as if a ghost. In “Snapdragons” the poet’s language alerts us to a life altering trauma in the otherwise innocuous setting of the home’s garden. She describes “a concrete patio/ slivers of garden beds” that “flagged each side/ I’d watch her stoop for hours/ remove weeds/ turn soil/ tend to what grew in dirt.” As she watched the woman pulling weeds, she would “sometimes trail behind/ and decapitate snapdragons/ inserting index and thumb inside their silky skulls.” A perfect metaphor for a woman’s silencing by abusive anger and control, the snapdragons put up with their fate of having “their jaws ripped apart/ and flung,” but “if those snapdragons had a voice” they would have said “they’d rather sway on stems/ than be manipulated.” The woman is threatened that “soon there’d be no snapdragons,” a metaphorical, existential threat. The poem thus ends with the unspoken eloquence of the woman’s silencing, in “long ago my tongue stopped moving,/ all I could do was nod.” The haiku which follows reiterates the trauma of the abuse which has now become internal dialogue in its destructive game, with the lines:

can’t tell anyone

about the voices inside

they control my tongue.

In the poem “There Are Things We Don’t Talk About” five facts written simply in bullet style, reveal the attempted suicide of a family member. A feeling of impending dread builds up in us as we read, each frightening, suspenseful moment becoming our own angst: “how we clung to each other on an/ orange tweed couch, listening for/ the shot that didn’t come/ how we waited for the next time.” Weaving pieces of representative language, Lisa Reynolds translates reality with finesse and clarity, summoning feelings which immerse the reader in her vivid poetic world.

In “Fawn,” the poet’s yearning for motherhood arises when a fawn “left by her mother/ appears,” a delicate vision that emerges in her “sanctuary garden” stirring up her maternal instinct:

a familiar ache

to nurture what is not mine.

How blessed and unblessed am I

to hover

like a parent in a doorway.

The poem “Shapeshifter” follows with beautiful, indelible images. In this piece, the poet’s physical limitations magically transmute into the miraculous:

My body doesn’t always move

the way it should

it staggers, falls

before rising on tiptoes

to reach staircase chandelier

swings from it

until wings break through backbones

transforming deadweight

to weightless wonder.

In “Wanting More” and “Is This Love” the verses capture the ineffable, subtle nuances of the enigma of love. “Sometimes it begins with a look.” Or “there are times/ when my eyes flutter open/ and I find him staring./ Is this love/ I want to believe/ but fear to know/ knowing changes everything.” These verses are meditations that amplify the pivotal emotional details of the ending of a relationship.

In “Invisible Barrier,” we read: “In bed, we share space like strangers on transit/ not touching, not speaking, just present./ Come morning, the sun will brighten/ dark rooms, the smell of coffee will fill/ cool air, but this barrier between us will/ remain./ Who will break through first and/ journey alone?” What follows is an emotional letting go with two brief, but poignant haikus: “laundry days/ no longer/ his & hers/ and “misty water/ last look/ before goodbye.” When the breakup finally happens the poet writes of the ensuing grief: “I no longer fight it/ I let it do what it needs to/ she said it would be like this/ all heartache would come at once/ then leave me in a sedated state/ where tears are merely droplets that flow/ my solo, a dance/ twirling towards tomorrow” followed by the emotionally potent haiku “long days/ daring to be happy/ cold shore.”

From profound pain, redemption and beauty resurge in the poems as we near the end of the collection. In “You and Me,” we read: “caught in a circle of hellos,/ we avoid each other’s eyes/ side hug and pretend we were/ never more than we are now/ and yet, in that brief moment/ when you drew me in/ I heard your breath hitch/ the way it used to before we kissed.” This is such a beautiful poem! The tension of energy between two lovers who are no longer together is palpable, everything unspoken, said.

In the next piece, in her gentleness and generosity of spirit, the poet expresses that “there is beauty in believing/ that somewhere you have found that spark/ the one you never spoke of/ the one I never questioned/ in fear of not being enough./ Even after so much pain, she harbours no hard feelings, only hope for mutual happiness.

Lisa Reynolds’ poems release an unparalleled intensity of feeling with few words as in the haiku “long days/ daring to be happy/ cold shore.” Three brief lines hold so much information, so much power. The last two words say everything.

The poems in this collection capture challenges one faces in crisis, the resulting struggle, and the final emergence into renewal. Impeccable, unassuming use of language and perfect metaphors touch the core of who we are. The words sparkle with meaning. The magic of Lisa Reynolds’ poetry is perfectly chosen language that sparks into being a world of family secrets and experiences, piquing our curiosity to discover more by delving further into the pages of her book.

In the last gorgeous, tactile poem the oyster’s filaments of nacre have spun trauma and pain into not one, but myriad pearls. The poetic, alchemical process has transmuted suffering to the philosopher’s stone of love. “Self Love” the actualizing phase of spiritual healing is invoked here by the poet to quell the ache in her heart. As in a prayer to an all-embracing comforting deity she writes:

I call it to me

like a lake pleads

for waves to drench its desert shores

and it comes

not in pale drifts

but pearls of rain

draping me

with wet light

until I am smiling.

If the poetic quest is about synthesizing the broken fragments of our life into wholeness, in Pearls of Rain, Lisa Reynolds has achieved and surpassed this feat with a collection of verses of unique beauty, depth and healing power. The poems in Pearls of Rain are gifts.

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Lisa Reynolds is a member of the Ontario Poetry Society, Royal City Literary Arts Society and the League of Canadian Poets. She is the recipient of the Ontario Poetry Society’s 2023 Ted Plantos Memorial Award. Lisa holds degrees from York University. She is published internationally in anthologies, literary journals and magazines, with translations in Farsi, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish. Her poetry has been featured in art/ poetry exhibits in Canada and the USA. She lives east of Toronto.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews is a poet, author, teacher and the host & coordinator of the Oakville Literary Cafe Series. Her latest book of poems, Meta Stasis, was released in July 2021 by Mosaic Press. Her collection of local poems and photography, Sunrise Over Lake Ontario, was launched in 2019. Her previous poetry publications include: Sea Glass, The Whispers of Stones, The Red Accordion, Letters from the Singularity and A Jar of Fireflies. Josie’s poetry has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Prize, The Canada Literary Review, The Eden Mills Literary Contest, Accenti Magazine Poetry Contest, Venera Fazio’s Literary Contest and The Henry Drummond Poetry Prize. Her poetry has won first place in the 2023 International Poetry Prize: Antonio De Ferraris, Citta del Galateo in Italy, in the 2008 Arborealis Anthology Contest of The Ontario Poetry Society and in the 2015 Big Pond Rumours Poetry Contest. Josie’s poem The First Time I Heard Leonard Cohen was nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2022. Josie is the author of two non-fiction books: How the Italians Created Canada (the contribution of Italians to the Canadian socio-historical landscape) and In the Name of Hockey ( a closer look at emotional abuse in boys’ sports.) Josie teaches workshops for Poetry in Voice and for Oakville Galleries. She writes and lives in Oakville, Ontario.

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