Pictograph

February 16, 2015
“Remember that you are a gesture, a salt and water drum, in resonance with the personal and the ancestral,” writes Kwasny (The Nine Senses) in one of the 60 prose poems that compose her fifth collection, a meditation on nature, humanity, history, and art. Kwasny situates her poems among the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites of Montana’s Elkhorn Mountains, but travels widely in both physical and psychic space: “We who are rock, are moving now, though we are supported by bone.” The work combines ekphrasis, philosophy, and ecological thinking with flights of personal lyric. “Ten thousand years ago, the glaciers melted, and now the coal’s for sale,” she reminds readers. “To hold onto one’s form, is that so important?” The poet’s strength is in letting these various fields give way to each other with ease, connecting them to the larger arc of human history, and allowing the divisions between human and nature to give: “We were grazing, then running, then the ground, which is all we know, suddenly opened up and betrayed us.” Kwasny is able to summon the history and emotional intensity of her subjects, connecting both herself and her readers to nature and time alike.

April 15, 2015

Award-winning poet Kwasny (The Nine Senses) makes us look, really look, at the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites near her Montana home, which she describes in lush but exacting detail while reminding us that we're but "a thumbprint in the cliff." These prose poems then keep opening up into discussions of light and sight, death and aging ("What is form but the reining in of desire"), loneliness and solitude, and "blackbirds falling right out of the skies while we lobby for still more concealed weapons." Beautifully coherent and immensely satisfying.

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