A Kinship with Ash - by Heather Swan (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>In Heather Swan's A Kinship with Ash, wisdom is hard won. Elegant, image rich, and full of birdsong, these poems question and delight.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>It's difficult to accept that shadows, too, are products of the natural world. Often we hold what's beautiful next to what we fear. As much as we want to appeal to our better angels, cruelty hovers and haunts our hearts. In Heather Swan's <em>A Kinship with Ash, </em> wisdom is hard won. Elegant, image rich, and full of birdsong, these poems question and delight. But what is poetry if not the mind's silhouette? In the pastoral tradition we confront our reflection, and here, Swan uses nature to look inward. As if negotiating the cliff's edge, or wading into open water, her speakers are at the mercy of currents. We are left with faith. Reading these poems is an act of surveying light. -Amaud Jamaul Johnson</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>Heather Swan meticulously collects the brand names of pesticides and herbicides, placing them in titles at intervals throughout this book of witness for a threatened world. Strung together, the linked names become a chilling shadow-poem. This attention to the specificity and minutia of <em>what is </em>makes this work an implicit interrogation of various forms of toxicity and contamination-environmental, psychological, linguistic-as well as a challenge and call to action. Take, for example, "Pesticide X: Serenade" in which we hear "the rasp of soil shifting / as worms worked their way through," but as years pass and increasing environmental harm takes its toll, "the spaces grew quiet. / One by one / the voices were silenced." <em>A Kinship with Ash </em>draws a timely portrait of how we arrived at this new age with its necessary re-evaluation of the role, place, and vulnerability of the human. -Laurie Sheck </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>Like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Annie Dillard before her, Swan is a poet of witness, laying bare the price we pay for pesticide use, fossil fuel extraction, excess and ignorance, but in language so beautiful, lyricism so sweet, that even a world of disintegration and extinction retains reason for meditative joy and celebration. Beset by ravage and shatter, the poet finds "the sweet luck / of this life" in a natural and human world "filled with a wild holiness," for "it is at the edge of damage / that beauty is honed." These are poems of elegy and affirmation, of sensory evocation and deep abiding truths. Exacting and passionate, Swan insists it is "No use measuring / how long sweetness lasts." By any measure, it lasts at least as long as we have poets like Heather Swan, and books like this book of marvels, this marvel of a book. -Ron Wallace </p><br>
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