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A History Of The Garden: Poems (Western Literature Series)

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Katharine Coles's book, "A History of the Garden" isone full of beautiful, personal poetry that reveals an intelligentauthor behind the scenes, playing with words and situations. Even in her first poem, "Fear of Falling," Coles, playing with the ideas of gravity and death, writes that the night she was born "a moon as full and hot as August scraped the rooftops." The rest of the poem builds on this, drawing on links between gravity, lightness and death.

In a later poem, "Natural Disasters," she describes a "mother's lifelong rage" as the "slow burn of a wire behind an old house wall," and continues to describe the mother's rage internally and externally, building up to an emotional crisis that, surprisingly, doesn't occur.

What the sum of these poems represent is a clear, scientific approach to poetry; it is poetry that uses science to illuminate and compare, but which is not dehumanized by science. Her poems are full of love, for the earth and for the people in it.