Lisa Baird's When Whales Went Back to the Water

Contained devastation

When Whales Went Back to the Water is grounded in the confessional lyric, yet maintains a kind of distance that’s compelling, as in a relationship where one partner alternately reveals and repels until the other’s completely caught up in chasing these swings.

Baird works through the traumas of adolescence and adult sexuality with a cool, observant eye. She invokes the language of science in a way that’s both loving (neat science facts!) and detached (WTF are these weird science facts in the face of emotional truth?). There’s an enjoyable shiftiness here, playing both sides and having it both ways (yes, that’s a queer joke). “I’ve been practising,” she says, “but can only hold my breath for three minutes. / It is calming to think about large numbers.” Further to the subject of large numbers, “The sum of the world’s online / data in 2018 was 33 zettabytes / which, despite sounding like / a school of tropical fish, is a huge / number …”.

We’re given clues that some of this detachment is dissociation. (“You, watching it all from above, floating / by a light fixture ….”) Baird tackles tough subjects, particularly around domestic violence, but her approach gives the reader a manageable pathway for assimilating its cumulative impacts. She’s very good at isolating the suspended moment, the vignette, the brief anecdote that contains within tolerable bounds some small aspect of a slow-moving devastation. “The pitch and tilt of it like a field where I sing out to the dark / to learn where I am, while bats eat mosquitos // that have bitten me, my blood moving and warm in us all.”

Publication Details

Author: Lisa Baird

Title: When Whales Went Back to the Water

Publisher: University of Alberta Press

Year: 2025