Sue’s Reviews > Blackbird Song > Status Update

from Beatitude:
Birdsong tumbling from the branches of maple and elm, Venus’s predawn rising
tugging the sun up on a line.

from “What the Body Remembers:
Late October, grey sky and drizzle
threatening to turn into snow, all the sharp
edges of the world blurred, the few colours left faded in the
landscape. [feels so much like autumn]

“After so long caged in the traps and pitfalls of mind, the land returns— returns you to occurrence arising of itself, out of the void. And just like that, somehow you’ve found your life again, not having recognized absence until the return.” (seasons change and rescue us)

Doxologies: “Out of your own thoughts come the materials for the beginning of everything; out of your own memory, eventually, comes everything that cannot endure.”

The second section of the book is comprised of prose poetry, more overtly biographical, continuing with the same nature-based imagery but now focusing on family, memory and its gaps and leaps between generations, native life.

The poems are simple and flowing, but also have complexity behind their exteriors. Nature is everywhere.

If the World Were Your Home
It is the first day of November. All
the leaves are down.
Still the north-wind persists.
[I feel and see a major Asian influence here, and like it]