Customer Reviews

Reading Novalis in Montana

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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!

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.

I do not agree with one reviewer of this book who suggested that the author experience more and write less. As i do appreciate much of Ms. Kwasny's intellectual reflections in this book. I must admit I am not a child of the 60s. My favorite poems are those very old fashioned magical/emotional narratives that hint at depth of experience rather than seek to rationally explain it.

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.