Tonya Lailey, Farm: Lot 23

 

The End of an Orchard

I want to land
on another reason
to yank out the farm’s fruit
trees, cut off their coming
peaches, pears, cherries, plums,
replace them with vines
for wine.

My mother had it right.
Picking cherries didn’t add up.
Couldn’t pay for the baskets
never mind the babysitter.

And she didn’t like to work up
on ladders
up, in trees.

Maybe it was just the money.
Even so, I want to make room
for another understanding.

     My mother stood level with the vines,
     took their arms into her own,
     set her feet in step with their roots,
     curled her fingers around their trunks
     and bowed to them—

as if they were her trellis.

“I’m prone to forgetting,” Calgary-based poet Tonya Lailey writes to close the opening poem, “Farms and Poems,” of her full-length debut, Farm: Lot 23 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem / has always been / the living in it.” According to her author biography on the back of the collection, Lailey “spent her childhood on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She started a winery there in 2000 with her family and winemaker Derek Barnet. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade until 2020.” The length and breadth of the poems within Farm: Lot 23 explore and examine her relationship with that plot of family land, from the days of her grandfather and a history of that particular corner of Ontario to her own experiences growing up and eventually working within those particular boundaries. “I think about the new reaches of peaches,” she writes, to close the poem “Peaches,” “the cultivars we’ve bred and breed for travel. / And that year, after the war supports ended, // when my grandfather still farmed peaches / and Wentworth Canners closed, unable to compete / with plantation agriculture to the south, // all around the township peaches ripened / then rotted in piles.” She writes poems from the Niagara Peninsula—wine country, for those unaware—managing the music and rhythms of daily activity on a working farm, offering these as both documentary and as a way to speak to the human elements of familial life, such as the poem “The Give in Inches,” as she offers: “My parents sum / up the farm in twenty acres; the survey says / eighteen-point-five. They never do agree // on boundaries.” These are sharp poems, composed with enormous thought and care, composed as both portrait and a love letter to an eroding space. “On the other side / of the property line,” she writes, to open “Acre,” “the riverbank / the river, / chestnut,      basswood,       black walnut / American elm,      black willow / bitternut hickory,       blue beech,      butternut / blue ash, sassafras—with its leaf asymmetry. // Nothing / in       a / row.”

Across opening poem and four sections—“CONCESSIONS,” “LINES,” “END POSTS” and “FARM PHOTO”—Lailey offers such a soft and subtle music articulating a working farm from the inside, not merely as reminiscence but contemporary, working and lived-in space. There’s a thickness, a density, to her detail, one that embraces the lyric but carves the lines so precisely to hold all that is required, but without sacrificing her music. She writes a precision to her lushness, on seasonal crops of cherries, peaches, pears and plums. “Away,” she writes, as part of “Out to the Farm in July,” “from the stewed lap / of the shore / and the scents in banks / of raspberries / spicebushes / fringed bromes / hop sedges / bonesets / running strawberries [.]”

There does seem an articulation of contemporary space, whether cities, suburbs or rural landscapes, that begins to feel a bit outdated without mention of these same landscapes framed through the lens of colonization. When modern prairie poetry began to explode and take shape throughout the 1960s and 70s, long poems often referenced Indigenous people and Indigenous spaces, so to compose or articulate a space without that acknowledgment now seems outdated, even incomplete. It was a difficulty I remember having a few years back with Saskatchewan poet Gerry Hill’s 14 Tractors (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2009), for example. For Lailey, the original occupants of her family land sit deep across the foundation of her lyrics, from the prior names of roads, or streams, or through her poem “Our Necks in the Woods,” writing:

After the Royal Proclamation of 1763, after the Treaty of Niagara, after the Treaty of Fort Niagara, after the British acquired thousands of acres in exchange for 12,000 blankets, 23,500 yards of cloth, jaw harps, thousands of silver ear bobs. After the Mississaugas accepted “300 suits of clothing” in exchange for exactly what is unclear but is recorded as the ownerhip of a “four-mile trip of land” along the Niagara River between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. After the colonizers cleared land to plant corn, wheat, other vegetables and to raise livestock, only a few of them returned the odd acre to trees.

Later farmers, like the ones in my family, replaced unprofitable fruit trees with European grape vines for wine. Others erected greenhouses to supply the grocery market.

I can’t think offhand of too many poets currently writing on farm-specifics, although I’ve recollections of certain pieces by Bren Simmers, Sandra Ridley and Karen Solie, including invocations of labour as an adult. The structure and approach of these poems compare to Solie’s, certainly, offering a perspective I can fully appreciate and understand from my own experience, attempting to acknowledge the loss of a home and homestead, and an approach to daily living: the family farm. The collection closes with the long poem/section “FARM PHOTO,” that begins:

The farm road doesn’t end
or begin

where the photo halts
at the frame

at a stir fry vegetable
angle—the sort of slice

to render a carrot’s round
an oval

stylishly dismantle
a whole—

not that a farm is every wholly
land ever not only

a patch a plot
a pinch a section

an instant of earth of life
as in one that has taken

place roughly
largely on one 20-acre lot