Pictograph

“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. [em](Mar.) [/em]