Keeping Still

Hayna’s collection is not simply a book of poems, it is a congeries of perceptual restructurings of common realities. She has lived an examined existence and it is clear from these works that she has used a very sharp focusing capability very well. If poetry is perceptual at all, in the hands of any writer, then here we have one of the very best examples of the poetry of re-perception. An awareness of her mastery evokes awe as she does magic conjurations with her language. Words conjoin in surprising ways. Every poem seems to rework the ability of words to convey the worthwhile-ness of existence. Affirming something all of us learn in time, that every life contains pain and failure and the suffering which honest self-perception forces on us, Lois Hayna calls on us, with her words and their re-perceptive reality to face life and to truly live it. And there is music in these lyrics. Her lyrics possess tonalities of risk taking, fear, the unknown and unknowable, and loss. But too, there is joy at being and in life. Although she wonders at mysteries in her perceptions and in her memories, a single word marks Hayna’s art and her tremendous skill: clarity.