New West Book Review

Montana’s Melissa Kwasny Crafts Poetry With a Scientist’s Eye

By William Notter, Guest Writer, 9-06-10

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. 

“An irruptive species,
the book says, which means they won’t be back
next year or next, like my grandmother, for instance.
So, after work, I make popcorn, fill her green bowl,
take it out to the creek where she might find it.”

The title poem references Novalis, who, Kwasny told Emily Donahoe of the Helena Independent Record, was “a German mystic poet in the early 1800s who believed that the natural world was symbolic of a divine world, and whose writings were the precursors to romanticism as we know it.” This relationship between physical and divine is laced through the rest of the collection—the particulars of the world Kwasny describes are loaded with significance.  The poems bring together diverse elements to create “strange speech/at the edge of our reason.”

The collection reflects a broad range of interests and study.  Along with plant, insect, and animal species, Kwasny invokes Greek and Native American myths, Socrates, Emerson, and several poets.  But the allusions are not simply decorative, and not the kind that require footnotes or an Internet connection.  References are given context with quotes or description, and each one has a metaphorical function.  A poem that mentions Psyche, for example, seamlessly includes the relevant elements of her story, and illuminates both the myth and an experience from contemporary life. “Common Blue” names several butterfly species, and while the names themselves are evocative (Comma, Question Mark, Angelwings), Kwasny also makes each one vivid with an image. 

Kwasny’s language is matter-of-fact, conversational, (“the plastic over the woodpile swells, resists”) and almost deceptively simple considering the complex metaphors in some of the poems.  Meaning evolves from concrete details, images and brief narratives—the transition from thing to idea seems effortless and often surprising.  In a section from “The Waterfall,” one of three long poem sequences, a community suffers a series of personal misfortunes as wildfire season approaches.  “The jam scorched…The motorcycle was stolen,” and then

“A young rodeo rider
who got drunk at the bar
forgot his horse
was still tied to his trailer.
Seventy miles an hour down the freeway
that night.
After that, the fires began in earnest.”

We see the fires build, see how they affect both people and wildlife, and finally,

“We used to be full of the beauty of the world,
to be full like that the accomplishment.
Now, the smoke and heat deafen us.”

Those three lines embody a tension running through the book.  There is beauty alongside tragedy, loss contrasting with fulfillment, and apparent significance among questions about what it means to be.  “The Waterfall” ends with

“No answers,
only the names of things, burdock and rue, the creek bottom gulch
draw darkening.  We’re not to pray after dark, if you believe what
you’re told, and you do.
Oh, grandfather, you’re almost blind but it’s not late,
only the shadows gathering in afternoon.

See the lights there, below us, past the trees—sheer water, all shine.”

Despite that claim of no answers, the collection’s naming of things and telling of stories make answers that can be experienced viscerally if not defined logically.  As when “We serve raspberries and the room fills with their perfume,” Melissa Kwasny’s poems evoke something intangible, but are richly textured and full of tangible imagery and detail.  Wherever else it takes the imagination, her work is always connected to the familiar, usually the natural world.  Her language makes the ordinary seem mysterious, like “the half-human voice/we hear in the creek.”

Poet William Notter grew up on the plains of northeastern Colorado, and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.  Notter’s poems appear widely and he has received many honors for his work, including the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for More Space Than Anyone Can Stand (Texas Review Press, 2002), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Last year Notter published his poetry collection Holding Everything Down (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), which won the 2008 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and is a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.

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