A Kinship with Ash

Heather Swan meticulously collects the brand names of pesticides and herbicides, placing them in titles at intervals throughout this book of witness for a threatened world. Strung together, the linked names become a chilling shadow-poem. This attention to the specificity and minutia of what is makes this work an implicit interrogation of various forms of toxicity and contamination-environmental, psychological, linguistic-as well as a challenge and call to action. Take, for example, "Pesticide X: Serenade" in which we hear "the rasp of soil shifting / as worms worked their way through," but as years pass and increasing environmental harm takes its toll, "the spaces grew quiet. / One by one / the voices were silenced." A Kinship with Ash draws a timely portrait of how we arrived at this new age with its necessary re-evaluation of the role, place, and vulnerability of the human. -Laurie Sheck

Like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Annie Dillard before her, Swan is a poet of witness, laying bare the price we pay for pesticide use, fossil fuel extraction, excess and ignorance, but in language so beautiful, lyricism so sweet, that even a world of disintegration and extinction retains reason for meditative joy and celebration. Beset by ravage and shatter, the poet finds "the sweet luck / of this life" in a natural and human world "filled with a wild holiness," for "it is at the edge of damage / that beauty is honed." These are poems of elegy and affirmation, of sensory evocation and deep abiding truths. Exacting and passionate, Swan insists it is "No use measuring / how long sweetness lasts." By any measure, it lasts at least as long as we have poets like Heather Swan, and books like this book of marvels, this marvel of a book. -Ron Wallace