Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds

In a poem from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, while watching his father working in the garden, Seamus Heaney recalls his grandfather digging for peat on a bog—“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head.” These vivid, onomatopoetic lines were startlingly familiar the first time I read them, like sounds I had heard many times before. “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” Heaney continues, “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” There was something about this physical connection to the land evolving over generations until it turned into these determined, blunt words that made Heaney’s poetry seem to have much more of an awareness of its purpose than the other books I was reading at the time. And then, last month, I felt this same “digging,” this sensation of going deeper than usual, when I picked up Effigies, an anthology of four poets from the Pacific Rim published by Salt this June. Like Heaney, these poets—dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Māhealani Perez-Wendt—write of communities and landscapes that have changed a lot since the time of their grandparents, even the time of their parents. In okpik’s Alaska, “The soil rattles with bleached / ivory bones, bones clack and claw / at the walls of glaciers melting, / crossing all darkness into grey.” Ghosts inhabit McDougall’s Hawai‘i—“standing by my bed, the same size of my father, then gone / for two years—with the same hesitance to speak.” In Perez-Wendt’s Bury Our Hearts at Wal-Mart, etc. the “sands of [her] birth / Are digging places / Are trenching places / And the grandfathers moan / And the grandfathers moan.” Throughout this excellent collection, these four very different poets—sometimes singing quietly of the world around them, sometimes raising their voices in anger at the injustices they feel—always keep digging.

Francis Reynolds is an intern at Guernica. His interview with image theorist W.J.T. Mitchell appeared in April in Guernica’s blog. Read his last staff pick here.

Tags: Poetry, staff recommendation

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