The leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through /
only one side of each.If "poetry is what we do to break bread with the
dead," as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three
earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a
dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles,
moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through
the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century
with Emily Carr.Though the environmental and political problems of the
twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with
similar challenges. Wang's writings embody an ideal relationship between
self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling
the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in
conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an
antidote to our age's dependence on digital forms of communication. He
also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity
of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present.
Carr's writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the
enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the
impulse to creatively express one's being runs through the entire
natural world.Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of
Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as
well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.
