Ground Effect After Spin Recovery by Betsy Lynch

If you think that you have to be a pilot to read and understand Ground Effect After Spin Recovery: Poems by Betsy Lynch, you would be missing her luminous vision of the world, and of the heart. Though these poems do indeed take flight, they are not only from a small plane over the Tampa Bay skies, but also from a fishing boat on Lake Champlain, and from the keen perspective of a woman who has experienced much sorrow as well as hard-won redemption.

You will find yourself savoring, as I did, her skill at creating matter-of-fact statements that are perfectly crafted, and so lyrical that you want to circle them in purple ink: “our roots save us” and “red wine made of me a princess” and “…second chances, paradoxes like dying to live, surrendering to win, giving to receive.”

This book is also a love song to her late brother, the beacon that guides her; he is both landmark and lighthouse. His very absence is also a presence, a ghost compelling her to reflect on hurricanes, rocket ship schematics, trashcan turkeys, traditional Irish music. There is such wistfulness and longing in these pieces, all of them imbued with the search for home. Like us, Betsy is a seeker, trying to define where home is, what home means, and when it is we feel most at home.

–Rachel R. Baum is a Best of the Net nominated poet, author of the poetry chapbooks How to Rob a Convenience Store (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) and Richard Brautigan’s Concussion (Bottlecap Press, 2023). She is the editor of the award-winning Funeral and Memorial Service Readings, Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999).

Elizabeth Lynch, poet and airplane pilot, takes us with her as she flies over a landscape that offers a necessary respite from the rich but fraught life on the ground: “. . . swirling white sandbars / current-carved as though by / a contemplative god.” And in one particularly gripping poem, “Spin Recovery; Hard Opposite Rudder, Yoke Down,” we panic with her as she hears the stall horn squawk and feels “the deadly tug down/as one wing” stalls.

Recovery in all senses of the word is a strong current in this book, as is the search for home, metaphorical and actual. This search animates these poems, home that can take many different forms, from the “lake-polished black/igneous volcanic stones” of Lake Champlain’s Adirondack coast to the love of a lost brother whose ghost remains. And in one of the last poems in the book, “Reference Points: After the Hurricane,” a calm catalog of things destroyed – a 50-foot cabin cruiser, roofs that could not withstand “nine hours of 140 mph winds,” the demolished bridge to the mainland – also includes items inexplicably saved – “a grand entry chandelier,” whose glass remains intact even though “Its home is gone.” At the end of that poem, we witness the faith of the poet: “I am here. I am safe, / the only true reference points, /in the end.”

–Karen Henry, author of All Will Fall Away, whose work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cathexis Northwest, Crosswinds, Nonbinary Review, Pine Row, and Stoneboat, among other journals, and in the anthologies Night Forest: Folk Poetry and Story and Of Our Own Accord.