reading

My qarrtsiluni co-editor Anna Dickie and I exchanged books. Hers, titled heart notes, arrived while I was teaching last week, and finally over the holiday I had time to take it in. Her poetry, like her photography, is much connected to the natural world, often the garden. There's wit and wisdom here. I love especially how she takes on the idea of ordered chaos. Garden work and life work encounter "drought and deluge...scored into the heartwood," and Anna returns to this theme. She brings the sharp sensibility of a photographer to these strong, beautiful poems. You read and see word images developing across her lines in sound and sense the way a photograph comes up out of the soup of light and chemical. The book was published by Calder Wood Press. Go check it out.