DIVIDING THE WAYSIDE, Jenny Haysom

Jenny Haysom

Winner 2019 Archibald Lampman Award

 Finalist 2019 Gerald Lampert Award

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-926794-84-6
$18.95 CDN / $17.95 US | Trade Paperback
September 2018

The liminal strip that divides the highway from the surrounding land is called a wayside. Often thick with wildflowers and insects, it’s a natural space that coexists with traffic and exhaust. In Dividing the Wayside, Haysom likewise navigates the territory in between. Her voice is passionate and charming, her language precise and musical.

Praise for Dividing the Wayside

Jenny Haysom’s ear is maturely attuned, her craft deftly managed, her poems loaded with wry, remarkable metaphors, allusions, homages, puns, eclectic observations, and moments of delicate feeling. Dividing the Wayside is a seasoned and exceptional début.—Steven Heighton

Just as a “wayside” is a liminal strip that divides the highway from the surrounding land, a natural space meant to coexist with the velocity of traffic, so too does Jenny Haysom’s Dividing the Wayside navigate a host of territories “in between”—between lust and suffering, wisdom and innocence—with lines and stanzas both precise and sonorous, delicately crafted and unforgivingly complex. This is a poet whose cultivated voice and ear for language are deftly heard, and whose verses leave their mark in the mind even as they traverse the differing terrains of metaphor and allusion, humour and death.  A compelling read, at times tender and tragic, yet memorable throughout, requiring our undivided attention.—2019 Gerald Lampert Award juror

Dividing the Wayside is at once tender, generous, and lyrically explosive. The poet shines as she engages with writers and artists, examines the particulars of love and womanhood, and confronts both the beauty and ugliness of nature and human nature. Unflinchingly honest, the speakers in this collection find significance in beetle shells, dust, constellations, and everything in between. Much like her image of the heron catching fish in the shallows, Jenny Haysom, too, is a diviner. Open to the world, Haysom’s poetry deftly seizes the “sparks that dash and / turn like glitter.—2019 Archibald Lampman Award jurors