Customer Reviews

Green the Witch-Hazel Wood (National Poetry Series Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Emily Hiestand, with her radical trust in description as a guide to the moral life--and her extraordinary trust in the processes of logic--works reason--kneads it, assaults it really--till it explodes once again into the magic and mystery it truly is. In Green the Witch-Hazel Wood, the breathtaking hesitancies and suddenly explosive new vantage points of the physics of our time are suddenly alive in the poetry. It crackles like some source of energy we had no idea we had lived without and now--of course--would not." --Jorie Graham

"Here is a poet with an exact and exacting intelligence which is not based on presumptions, but which arrives at its...conclusions with melodic intricacy." --Derek Walcott

"Green the Witch-Hazel Wood...is a dazzling, engaging book, wherein the chief pleasure is watching the play of Hiestand's imagination and curiosity. [This is] a bountiful group of superb poems." --Frances Mayes San Jose Mercury News, October 15, 1989

"This poet aspires to a Wallace Stevens-like palette.... The best poems experiment with scale, expanding and shrinking scenes until images achieve potency.... A sensuality, an unabashed play with language...renders her work distinctive." --Lee Upton, Belles Lettres, Spring 1990

"The remaking of nature poetry is always a challenge within a discourse. Emily Hiestand seems particularly fit for the challenge... Her poems are full of (the) correspondences and yearnings she observed in Bishop. Her line is swift, with a lovely, citric vernacular about it. I admire this in particular about her work...a powerful and gifted stylization within her wider themes; a sort of sibylline demotic. The pleasures of tone make the control in her nature poems a real mix of verve and intensity... These are wonderful gifts to find in poetry." --Eavan Boland Partisan Review, Summer 1993

"One of the most valuable things about Hiestand's poems is their vision of human life, and of its most characteristic featur! e, language, as continuous with the natural world. Here there is no romantic abyss, and no sentimentality...This first collection of poemsdeclares its attention to and affection for the natural world beginning with the title and the cover painting.... The opening epigraphs then define the tasks at hand: "If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred" (Chief Seattle) and "What we admire in the green world is a benign selfhood./ And in one another, the ability to speak of this. / Or better, to act it out." (William Meredith, Dalhousie Farm ). The poems themselves take up Meredith's challenge with wit, intelligence, curiosity and obvious pleasure in the task at hand. Their attention to detail is both lavish and precise." --Sharon Bryan The Boston Review, October 1989

"Emily Hiestand's Green the Witch-Hazel Wood is a foray into logical thought, beginning with the traditional logic of the mind where the world is questioned and observed. Much of...the book is an attempt to define, and broaden, that window of reason. To do so, Hiestand examines the world under a scientist's microscope, somewhat reminiscent of Dickenson, Moore, and Bishop before her. There is a parallel logic of the senses. the dominant sense here is sight (Hiestand is also a painter) where objects are lovingly made palpable. Nouns are clean and simple--eggs and sofas and linoleum and the smell of kerosene. The known world sparkles and comes alive under her observant eye: "here is an orange that fits in the palm of your hand / with segments like maps, and sweet, and hard." Hiestand's volume was selected by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Series, and it shows some of the same proclivity for abstraction and philosophy as Graham's own work. This is an interesting turn of mind, and I find it refreshing." --Judith Kitchen The Georgia Review, Spring Summer 1990

These are poems that stop one's wandering mind and focus it onto an image, a detail (a rivet in a bridge, a passage from an archaic encyclopedia). And, remarkably, each detail contains an insight, a structural discovery about people, cultures, animals, or the hard material world. To be savored, and read out loud to good friends.