Histories Haunt Us - Softcover

Undisguised, her poetry takes on a powerful authenticity.
―Rhea Tregebov, The Globe and Mail

Powerfully elemental in image and sound, particularly in the ghazal-like title sequence, this is a beautifully sombre and sensual reflection on the faithful failing of language.
―Jennifer Still, Winnipeg Free Press

Finlay has a gift for weaving many images into neat patterns with open-ended conclusions. She frames many pictures, some of which are fleeting while others probe in-depth the feelings, thoughts, and imaginings of the human psyche.
--Michael O. Nowlan, The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)

Uniting the [book's] two styles is Finlay's declarative sentences such as, "The finest art can be the ugliest metaphor" or "After the bliss of the baby came the flies." In Finlay's world, filled with lingering ghosts, broken hearts and sickness, where "you are an anchor or you are not," these sentences reflect a desire to make sense of it all. Anchored, these poems are, perhaps, but during a hurricane at night, in the middle of the ocean.
―The Telegraph-Journal (St. John)

In Triny Finlay's second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new motherhood: a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lover caught with somebody else; a son's critical illness -- things that "encroach, they devastate, so that you must decide: you are an anchor or you are not."

Whether she is contemplating the politics of drought in Eritrea or a safari in South Africa, Finlay does not let us forget the potency of our personal and collective histories. She also explores the expansive landscape of her experience, layering a vision of her world with that of her young son, and exposing the ache of obssession, of doubt, of
suffering. This is a fragile world, in which rivers overflow and fear can become paralysing. But there is hope here, too, for the "lusty aria" of the newborn child, for "a look we might have missed, in a different room," for the falling leaves that return to the ground, that recover us.