Montana's Melissa Kwasny Crafts Poetry With a Scientist's Eye
NewWest.Net All Headlines
September 06, 2010 9:00 AM
Reading Novalis in Montana
by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions, 96 pages, $16.00
Most of the poems in Melissa Kwasny's Reading Novalis in Montana could have begun as the daily journal entries of a Montana naturalist. With a scientist's eye for observation, Kwasny takes readers from sharply focused details of the natural world to a world of significance beyond the physical surface. The poems are grounded in everyday experience, but break open into metaphor as Kwasny weaves in elements of local history, mythology, literature and philosophy. She shows us scenes from the life we know, but there seems to be something else underneath, shimmering at the edges.
New West readers will recognize the book's physical landscape of brook trout, wildfire, geese in a thawing valley, and mule deer the color of stoneware, whose paths lead from dream to water. Redpolls begins with the speaker observing these birds as they visit her thistle feeder. She reflects on how a field guide characterizes the species, and then the poem makes a metaphorical jump, becoming not just about redpolls but about all of us.
