Reading Novalis in Montana [Paperback]

Melissa Kwasny (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2009

Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772-1801) a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more—inform daily life.

Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Reading Novalis in Montana stretches boundaries with a section of “reading poems”—poems in dialogue with romantic and modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, H.D., Novalis, Dickinson, as well as a sequence that is a twenty-first century take on “The Wasteland,” included with stunning lyric poems.

Using luxuriant syntax to string together conditional clauses, these poems throw the reader backward and forward within a line and a poem. Alternatively, repetition offers a commentary on meaning, chopping perception into fragments. Combined with a charming self-qualification that deliberately interrupts momentum, this work smartly ties the reader back down to earth.

Throughout details of lived experience emerge—hiking through the Pacific Northwest, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship —and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Much of the innovative poetry written in America is published not by the big houses, but by independent presses like Milkweed, and its many smaller siblings. Too often, our poetry is obscure, willfully ignorant of realities beyond the immediate self, and pathetic in its complaint, narcissism, and soullessness. Moreover, the language tends to be prosaic, when it's not self-consciously experimental. Kwasny falls into none of these traps; she writes romantic-environmental poetry of a high order, communing with nature in a language that never sells itself short. Can we imagine ourselves, gluttonous twenty-first century Americans, in a better relationship with nature? Can we see ourselves beyond artificial separations between the animate and the inanimate, between the sensate and the inert? Kwasny shows how, as she refuses to back down under the pressure of material degradation."
–Huffington Post, 10 Best Books of 2009

“The title poem in this collection quotes the German Romantic poet Novalis: ‘The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self’ — an apt motto for ecopoetry.To infuse nature with feelings, to question the separation of man and nature, defines romanticism. Twentieth-century ecopoetry by Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry has gone further in breaking such artificial barriers. Melissa Kwasny is a worthy successor to these spirits.”
–The St. Petersburg Times

“The work and studies of late 18th century German poet and philosopher Georg Philipp Freidrich von Hardenburg, or Novalis, set a complex backdrop for Melissa Kwasny’s latest book. However, Kwasny’s poems never slip into the pedantic as one might expect. The poems remain plastic and, at times, Spartan, and while the landscape itself often feels cold and phlegmatic (‘The dirt road is frozen.’), the speaker in the poems is never so: ‘I hear the geese first in my lungs.’ . . . Does the urge to die stem from despair, from the overwhelming urge to know, or from the urge to fuse oneself with the universal mind? Could it be any combination of these? Is such a notion quantifiable at all? Of course, Kwasny comes to no perfect solutions or explanations, but she offers some key questions, arriving most convincingly at a blend of man (as animal), mind and nature: ‘When I broke with the earth, in grief, the animals still gathered.’ Comforting. Sagacious.”
–Melinda Wilson, Coldfrontmag.com

“There are very few people who claim to have the world figured out. Trying to do so is the lost art Kwasny internally struggles with in her poetry. In ‘Is It Oblivion or Absorption When Things Pass from Our Minds?’ Kwasny talks about "the throwaway life" many humans beings lead. . . . Trying to find answers to questions of our purpose in the world is exhausting. Most just give up and lead the lives they think they have been given. Thankfully Reading Novalis in Montana never stops asking questions or trying to find answers, reminding the reader there is more to life than one settles for or often cares to know.” –Jill Hindenach, Feminist Review

"In Melissa Kwasny’s Reading Novalis in Montana, you will find that distilled title opened wide—the marriage of science and poetry in the uncompromising landscape of Big Sky Country. Like the geese populating this collection—evanescent letters forming in the air above us and moving on—Kwasny’s poems strike that tension between the concrete and the ethereal. Here is a voice brave enough to admit loving “flowers/more than people” and giving readers every reason to understand and celebrate that conviction. Read this book and know what it means to live with the world, rather than on it. "
—Eric Gansworth, author of A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function

"Surrounded by new books of poems that seem increasingly thin and merely clever, Melissa Kwasny’s work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior, and have a compass that deftly mingles the scholarly page with beauticians’ hopes and tobacco pouches; a naturalist’s tight focus with the wide gaze of a woman of the world; a lyricist’s gifts with a philosopher’s understandings. This is the real-deal stuff."
—Albert Goldbarth, author of The Kitchen Sink

“Because of Melissa Kwasny’s vision as a poet—her precision of observation, her whimsy and compassion—one might compare her writing to that of early naturalist Gilbert White, the founding father of ecology. But what can the design of a naturalist’s daybook be in the twenty-first century when half of the species of the world have been or are in a process of being extinguished? Melissa Kwasny creates a dialectic between self-effacement and articulation, and through Reading Novalis in Montana one experiences what an eighteenth century reader observed about the Journals of Gilbert White, that to read them is to find one’s whole world mended. I think it is the way the writer steadies the mind.”
—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature

“Like H.D., whom she paraphrases and in her artistry resembles, Kwasny knows ‘that image is not enough.’ Equally intuitive and erudite on the survival of mule deer in winter, Artaud's tormented mind, the Cree story of Wa-sak-a-chak, or what to do with the chokecherry pulp after jelly-making, her prismatic attention never simply reconciles to the patina of past reference, nor to the temptation to become too ‘enamored of the surface.’ Always querying the otherness inherent in existence, her poetry is meticulous in its moral attention, which is without sermon or admonishment. How to attend to the sum of each instance's experience without falling back upon evaluative methods we've learned by rote? Kwasny's methods of inclusivity and measurement are as open to empiricism as they are to invocation—of animal spirit, of myth, of the great poet philosophers, of the land itself, where ‘the dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese, first in my lungs.’"
—Rusty Morrison, author of the true keeps calm biding its story

Best Book of 2009, "Much of the innovative poetry written in America is published not by the big houses, but by independent presses like Milkweed. [Kwasny] writes romantic-environmental poetry of a high order, communing with nature in a language that never sells itself short."
–Huffington Post


Best Book Cover and Best Final Poem in a Collection
–Coldfront(2009 Year in Review)

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions (January 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571314296
• ISBN-13: 978-1571314291
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.4 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,270,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Meditation June 5, 2009

By MN Poetry Reader

Format:Paperback

This powerful collection of poems makes great use of the best of what the intersection of poetry and philosophy can offer - a space to meditate on life's larger questions, but a space grounded in the real, messy, beautiful world. These poems are strong, clear, and have a real heft - they stay with the reader long after she's put down the book. Highly recommended!

4.0 out of 5 stars nature and self-nurture September 26, 2010

By Amy Henry TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

In case you are a bit behind on your German Romantic poets, as I was*, here's a brief reminder on Novalis: he lived in the 18th century, died young, and wrote about the spiritual meaning of life and nature. One of his most famous quotes is "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

With this information in mind, I readily enjoyed Melissa Kwasny's book Reading Novalis in Montana. I assumed it would be an ode to all things in nature, but the book is far more complex than that. It does discuss the natural world, with a seeming focus on birds, trees, and animal life, yet it also examines the relationship of nature on the human mind. The questions we ask about nature can be asked about ourselves. The observations we make often reflect what is in our own hearts and imagination. She finds a connection between conscious thought and subconscious connections.

In "Sleep Comes from the Flowers", her reflections on what she sees reveals deeper questions.

Three hours the deer sleep, then back to the vowels
of the water, the all-day drowse of mice and grass and owls.
Snow like white dahlias. Deer curled together like buds.
The ice in the creek cannot bear any more cold
and cracks each night into a thousand mums. Petal
of the squirrel's lid, closed and safe. The trees stay awake,
or asleep, as you prefer. Like me, they take
what is offered them. But the animals strive, pace the fields
for food or mates. Do moths sleep together or apart?
Everything with consciousness must sleep, not merely rest,
though bird dreams last nine seconds or less
and fish can sleep while swimming....
The dark blooms in winter on the walls of the canyon.
We achieve our imagination in increments.

Somehow, her choice of mostly one and two syllable words creates a simplicity and a pace that sounds repetitive and quiet, almost like tiptoes in a quiet night. Yet the words 'consciousness', 'imagination', and 'increments' startle us out of our reverie. It's as though she awakens us from the quieter thoughts of sleep and dreams to what is in front of us: the natural world. It seems significant that she finds motifs of flowers everywhere: in the ice, the snow, the deer bodies, the squirrel's eyelids, and the shadows on canyon walls.

In "Herbs", she discusses nature's changes and emotional change:

Persephone caught
staring at a flower. Can beauty be compensation for grief?
Our own heliotaxis.

Like the robin, for instance, at sunset, atop the high spruce,
turning its breast to the sun,
or the layering through our lives of a particular herbage,

sweet pine, the prairie sages, the pink-rooted grass-
the American grass we braid and burn.

Even without belief, we must admit
to a certain sense of holiness, in their green-lit transparence,

in their capacity for light, and how our eyes are drawn to it....

To be changed internally from afar.

The significance of her words is deepened when you realize (thank you, Google!) that the grasses she mentions (sweet pine, prairie sage, and pink-root) are all herbs used in purification, and found in Montana. The reference to heliotaxis, which is the way a flower turns toward the light, also demonstrates a turning, or change, accomplished by focusing on light and beauty. Here the references to Novalis are especially clear.

This collection is meditative, quiet, and appealing for its breadth of topics, all linked in some way from the outer world to the inner heart.

*Actually, I had no clue who he was.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A look into the world of natural science using poetry as a vehicle March 10, 2009

By Midwest Book Review

Format:Paperback

Melissa Kwasny brings readers her third volume of poetry with "Reading Novalis in Montana" is a look into the world of natural science using poetry as a vehicle, and Kwasny executes it excellently. Moving, entertaining, educational are all fine labels to apply to "Reading Novalis in Montana". "11 Fire": White velocity. We dare not interrupt you./Stream of light in the light./Gender. The Surpreme fiction? Gender./The alchemy? Stars you build and stamp out./What is old: you are sweeping through it, jumping the creek. Arnica. Cedar waxwings./The pale pink spider. Your ash, already, anointing them./I cut the tree that fell in this winter's wind./I rake twigs into piles and pull the runners from the tines/to hand to you, to use for your quick ceremonies./Can you take what is negative, correct our mistake? We have/such plans for amelioration. As below, so above./Lightning. Sun. As above, so below. Igneous, metamorphic./You are the weed that grows spiky and voluptuous./You are the verb, sprung from seven sprouts of morning/to the twenty-two of afternoon./Fire beneath our lids, the farce of you.