By Tonya Lailey
What Kind of Daughter?
by Rayanne Haines
Frontenac House Poetry (2024)
The title of Rayanne Haines’ fourth book of poetry asks one of many hard questions the book addresses with fierceness and with love. Through insistent inquiring, Haines challenges female conditioning and the destructive beliefs that get embedded in a girl’s body long before her woman body learns to speak for itself. “What Kind of Daughter?”, confronts the shame seeded by porn culture and purity culture and how we’re supposed to look like one but behave like the other. (p.12). The speaker interrogates this baffling matter in the context of her mother’s diagnosis from ovarian cancer, a cancer the oncologist insists, rightly, will kill her. The daughter dares, in this context, to express concern for her own life…what kind of daughter/ does not stop?…turn observation/ from ambition. duty. feet paused. how long/ do we live paused? we must answer questions/ we are shamed for asking.
The speaker brings the reader into the shock of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and into her own anger about how unfair it feels given that her mother has only begun living…. Freedom 65, you know. She’s done her time. Fuck. Seriously, fuck., (p. 21). The raw clinical matter of her mother’s treatment and the family’s fatigue, frustrations, tenderness, humour and turmoil are all on the table.
Haines shares a rich brew of emotion, actively resisting notions about how a woman should feel in any circumstance. In “Her Belly is Full of Tumours” a title that does not mince words, Haines writes: I don’t want to watch her die. I want to bitch about how she interrupts and never listens and spends too much money at garage sales and Dollarama. I want to bitch about how she always suggests Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch, even though I’m vegetarian. Doing these things feels normal and healthy. I don’t want to talk about the one round of chemo that made her throat close so she couldn’t swallow water and had to be put on intravenous fluids so she wouldn’t die. (p.42)
The opening poem “Fictional Representation of Equal Rights” is a juicy manifesto for a woman’s right to define herself and a fiery acknowledgement of what’s lost when a woman is prevented from exploring life on her own terms. Lost freedom. Lost pleasure. Lost confidence. Lost health. Lost serenity. Lost opportunities to exercise ability. Lost lifeforce. Haines rallies for and celebrates a woman’s fullness in this poem, in no uncertain terms. Daughter of gut and blood and sinew, of bold and becoming, of banshee screen – when you are asked to dim, when you are asked to bend, to break into pieces for amusement and condemnation—spit instead…Lay naked under the willow tree. Read a porn magazine while you write the Ph.D…shape your name around a bullet and fire, back at everyone who decided your worth before you’d even begun. (p.10)
What is being a woman beyond pleasing a man? How does a woman learn to allow herself joy, experience pleasures of all kinds and to practice generous, tender love for herself? How does a mother grieve her own mother who did not go easy…/she wanted more time, endless time, / to beat this thing, to continue mothering us .(p.78)? How might a woman give herself a kind of life and love her mother didn’t have or ever say she wanted but which makes the daughter sad for how hard and cold that life looked from the outside? These are the questions the poems in this collection set down, questions that feel sharper for running alongside the blade of Haines’ mother’s long, difficult death from cancer.
The poems take diverse forms. None is precisely traditional or prescribed. Even the tercet structures in “Conflicting Feelings Caused by the End of…or “How I Might Lose My Mother to Cancer” (p.26) and the title poem, “What Kind of Daughter?” (p.28), break form in the final stanzas. The poem of quatrains, “Fault Lines” (p. 58), steps out of line only one stanza from the end of the poem to say, this is my depression. The particularity and variety of forms works well to animate the challenges to female conditioning and the energetic embrace of a full-bodied life in the other direction.
One of Haines’ many strengths as a writer is evidently her command of the short essay form or prose poem. “Wilding” (p.32) begins with the fact that wild turkeys can fly, Even the old ones do it. Even the ones with nowhere to go. From here, we enter the story of the speaker’s own fleeing, flying, re-wilding—a divorce, raising two boys alone, then selling the duplex where she raised her boys, taking off to Costa Rica with them mid-school year. There they navigated mountainous backroads with no GPS and an unreadable map, stayed in a hut just down from a dormant volcano, jumped off cliff edges. At a roadside restaurant near Jacó, a wild turkey lands on the speaker’s plate, a scene Haines writes with a cinematic eye and a taste for the beauty and humour in a sensual mess of fries, white cream sauce, shrieks and feathers.
The wild turkey’s sudden descent on her plate at the table becomes, in retrospect, the emotional, psychological metaphor for the end of her marriage almost a decade earlier. “I just fucked your husband.”, being the sudden wild turkey, the speaker’s ear being the plate on the receiving end of the call.
“Wilding” moves through the chill and aftermath of that wild turkey phone call to explore the shoreline of a new relationship, new love, new rough coastal property on Gabriola Island. Marvellously, wild turkeys re-appear. Gabriola Island, it turns out, is infested with them.
In “Seedlings” (p.16), another prose poem, Haines speaks to the smaller, gentler character that growth and change can take, through the cracks in the infrastructure of a landscape, a life: sister, you are embarking on a sacred mission, and this is no easy thing, this pursuit of joy. please release the shadows you condemn yourself with. The repetition of “sister” becomes a soothing susurration, a tender, rhythmic address.
The book is so packed with vivid body experiences, so loaded with fears, griefs, hopes and desire that it can feel overwhelming. I wondered at times, if this could not have been two books: One about the loss of Haines’ mother to ovarian cancer and Haines’ grappling with that loss and the other about Haines’ own breast cancer, divorce, fear of a womb cancer of some kind, single motherhood, commitment to pleasure and joy, and reckoning with the stories our culture tells us about what it means to be a woman. But it is precisely the oozing, dripping marvel and catastrophe of all this living that pulled me in tight to the pages of this book. The density is energy. I recognized it as the way life tends to happen, not in well-parsed out packages, in easy-to-chew bites from well-supported spoons, but in big hard or sloppy chunks we dig at with our hands, bend to with our mouths.
That said, there are poems in this collection that are removed from the intensity of events and the heated charge of emotion; poems steeped in acceptance. There’s a grounding beauty to these poems. I was glad for them, glad to rest on their poetic moss. “In Lieu of Flowers” (p.69) is one of them. The poem opens on the cusp of autumn in the hospital where the sheets on the bed where the speaker’s mother lies are an unassuming hospital blue. The blue becomes a beautiful kindness in the poem, along with the mother’s silver hair that glistens against the wall. These are the details that stall a moment in time, let it hover. Fear remains. Her mother is still dying, but the pretending it’s otherwise, the desperate fight in wanting it to not be so, has left the room. Fall is Mom’s favourite/ season. She will not live to smell it. The chemo, / at least, did not take her hair. And this makes us/ glad for her, that she is dying with her hair. That/ everyone who visits can see how beautiful she is/ with her silver hair in her blue bed.
In “Tips for Swimming” (p.80), there’s a bottle of lager under a beach bag on the beach and a nudist, half-hidden by driftwood. The speaker, whose mother has now died, is in the ocean, in the suck and crash of waves, gulping back the grief that still comes/ unbidden. This woman, made ravenous by grief, has lived through the worst of it. She spit at it when she needed to and curled up in a ball with it and wept. This woman knows the tricks cultural conditioning has played on her and what it has done to her relationship with her body. She’s onto it; she’s done being held down; she’s not drowning. No, she’s definitely swimming.
Tonya Lailey (she/her) writes poetry and essays. Her first full-length collection, Farm: Lot 23, was released this year by Gaspereau Press. Her poem, The Bottle Depot was shortlisted for Arc Poetry 2024 “Poem of the Year”. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC.