Ancient Light: Poems (Sun Tracks)

by Kimberly Blaeser

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.

The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.

Genres: Poetry

119 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2024

About the author

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser, is currently at work on a collection of “Picto-Poems” which combines her photographs and poetry. She was selected to serve as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015-16.

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent deep excavation into nature, violence, history, community that incorporates great poetic leaps in form and language. Always thoughtful, this is also an examination of tenderness with a series of poems titled, "The Way We Love Something Small." I will treasure this book, use it for inspiration, share the lessons it offers with others, and return to it over the space of many years to come.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kim has such a lovely, distinctive voice. You can hear her in every word.

[Joseph Spence Sr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author: Kimberly Blaeser
Title: Ancient Light
Country Published: USA
Publisher: The University of Arizona Press
Pages: 107
Language: English
Sold By: Amazon.com Services LLC
ISBN: 978-0-8165-5217-7

I met the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Distinguished Professor Emerita Kimberly Blaeser during her visit and poetry seminar at the university in Spring 2024. Her performance was brilliant. I purchased this book to learn more about her poetry writing style. The book is divided into four sections with various poetry forms and styles. The various sonnet forms and styles are dynamic. Her use of the caesura writing style is inspiring. Also captivating is her penning of the nonrhyming couplet forms on several pages. Her imaginative putting to paper of the concrete poem shows excellence in descriptiveness and artistry in poetic vibrancy. Likewise, her essence in outlining various sestet, quintain, prose poems, narrative structures, and septet, with intermittent and off-rhyming sequencing, is a majestic display of poetic brilliance to read and behold. I recommend this inspiring volume of uplifting poetry to my friends, associates, colleagues, and family to read for relaxation and education.


This is an excellent book of Native American poems. I purchased it to learn more about Native American poetry, and I am very satisfied with the text. It has enhanced my knowledge of poetry. I will recommend it to other poets seeking to learn about Native American poetry and broaden their horizons in the poetry spectrum.

[Jeffrey Boldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rich and moving book of poems infused with beauty, wisdom, and the healing light that comes from “learn(ing) by watching.” There are several breathtaking pieces that celebrate ‘The Way We Love Something Small,’ which provide insightful access to indigenous understandings of the human place in nature while precisely detailing the small thing it beholds. (A wetland filled with white--/egret heronry. Oh mythic wings?/ And plumes of spring!) Then there is the intimate poem ‘The Where in My Belly,’ where this rich culture and the profoundly personal come together masterfully. “I am from boats and canoes and kayaks,/from tribal ghosts who rise at dawn/dance like wisps of fog on water.” This made me think of the Noble Laureate Seamus Heaney’s masterpiece, Digging, another poem that made us hear the individual heartbeat of the poet and understand the rich culture that had helped shape it. Can poetry do any more than that?

[Mary Schreiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I attended Kimberly Blaeser’s AWP session in Kansas City hoping to push my writing forward. It was titled, “When We River IN-NA-PO Poets and Hydro-Poetics.” Every writer on the panel inspired me but one theme shifted my perception of nature—the importance of “writing with water not about it.”

After reading Blaeser’s COPPER YEARNING and ANCIENT LIGHT, I now understand the creative power of poetry. “Each sound a ripple, the aching edge of a cicada’s call.” submerged me in nature; “Wondering as I do / if I am motion or rock, / floating on the surface / or sunk now / dreaming in watery words.” showed me how to dive underwater and breathe; and “swimming in the moist black of earth / surrounded by dark aloneness” introduced me to earthly spirits. If you are a writer looking for inspiration, read Blaeser’s poems.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful and deeply grounding collection! I love how the poems establish and re-establish the speaker's connection to place and how place creates language, is inseparable from it: Blaeser weaves in Anishinaabemowin words and phrases and lets them speak for themselves. There is no glossary, and translations, if any, are loosely integrated within the text. A non-speaker of Anishinaabemowin gets to experience language without the interference of a dictionary. The idea of the automatic necessity for a translation is put into question and the position of English is challenged. Meaning happens in the experience of the poet's lines. Read, listen, and hear.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to poetry the way most do. Writing what could only be described as dreadful stanzas as a teenager to girls who would never read them. I like to come back to it every once in a while because poets are so much more engrained in the language than mere writers are. Beaser is a very naturalistic writer, undoubtedly due to her Native American ancestry. The poems here range from emotional to the political with the descending letter stylings of a modern-day ee cummings. All of them are eerily beautiful.

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kimberly Blaeser's poems are lovely and piercing. Books like this are why poetry is vital. It speaks to the soul and to the moment, and makes me determined to actively do my part in making the world a better place.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2024. 29/31

[☆subin☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can confidently point to poems in this collection and say: These Poems Changed My Life! and isn't that what I should be able to do with every good poetry collection?