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Reading Novalis in Montana
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 27, 2009
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57 people want to read
About the author
Melissa Kwasny
23 books18 followersMelissa Kwasny is the author of the acclaimed poetry collections The Nine Senses, Reading Novalis in Montana, The Archival Birds, and Thistle, which won the Idaho Prize in 2006. She is also the author of Pictograph: Poems, published in 2015.
Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Award, as well as the 2009 Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, the Montana Art Council's 2010 Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught as Visiting Writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana. Relevant to her teaching for Lesley University, which she has done since 1999, she was a poet in the schools in grades K-12 public schools, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years.
Kwasny was born in Indiana and earned an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.
Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Award, as well as the 2009 Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, the Montana Art Council's 2010 Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught as Visiting Writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana. Relevant to her teaching for Lesley University, which she has done since 1999, she was a poet in the schools in grades K-12 public schools, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years.
Kwasny was born in Indiana and earned an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 31, 2020
Exceptional. Her poems are like looking through a prism. I love her curiosity, length of attention, and tenderness toward nature. Also, her vocabulary is so expansive and musical. Reading many of her poems aloud is like eating pop rocks--the sounds just erupt in the mouth.
February 26, 2010
I had to give this book five stars, even though the longer poems-in-sections in the middle of the book felt too abstract for me, because the best poems are SO wonderful I've read them over and over again. Melissa Kwasny's poems are full of what I love best in poetry; they're full of surprising, lovely, vivid physical detail (Kwasny lives in Montana and makes the landscape so alive) combined with fascinating references to all kinds of stuff (philosophy, mythology, history). Plus they're intimate, heartful, passionate, complex but not too much so. Like I said, the middle of the book was hard going, at least for me, but the first and last sections, which feel more transparent, totally made up for that.
September 27, 2010
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.
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.
March 1, 2017
writer rummages through different canonical greats in poetry, constantly trying to "impress" us with what they have read, but it would impress me more if they actually wrote an original poem. Constant name dropping is a bad habit in poetry, Robert Bly even resorted to it.
December 1, 2010
I have been bowled over by Kwasny's work (both fiction and poetry) before. ARCHIVAL BIRDS is also a powerful collection of poems. Everything Kwasny publishes is powerful. She is a true original, brilliant and humble, lyric and inventive, observant and rigorous by turns. There is nothing arch about her work, ever. Nothing unconsidered or false. The title poem in this book is just...perfect. And the sequences "The Waterfall" and "The Directions" bear reading and re-reading. The lines and images are lovely, but what rends from those lines is more than beauty. It is human soul, struggling, surviving. I don't have the words for the loveliness that is in these poems, and I apologize for that. Just read Kwasny if you want to experience the transformation of language into art.
December 16, 2014
Read 2-31 Oct 2009. Mentioned positively on a good friend’s blog so I wanted to check it out but these poems just didn’t speak to me. But in a bit of synchronicity, the epigram at the start of Lord Jim is by Novalis.
September 29, 2009
full of grief and landscape.
September 27, 2011
Lyric poems -- Set mostly in Montana, with nature revealing things re: the human condition. Won some awards -- so I guess this is the type of poetry that wins awards.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews