The Way of the Earth
Poems
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
A lyrical collection examines the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis
The Way of the Earth is the fourth collection from award-winning poet Matthew Shenoda. In this, his most personal collection to date, he explores the temporal and fleeting nature of human life and the earth we inhabit. Through ruminations on the intersections of culture and ecology, the death of loved ones, and the growing inequities in our midst, Shenoda explores what it means to be a person both grounded to the earth and with a yearning beyond it. Memories of landscapes and histories echo throughout the sensations of the present: the sight of egrets wading in the marshes, the smell of the ocean, a child’s hand nestled in a warm palm. “Time never goes back,” Shenoda writes, “but the imagination must.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The personal and ruminative fourth collection from Shenoda (Tahrir Suite) explores human bonds to the earth and nature. Elegiac poems about ecology and landscape offer finely crafted poems about vistas literal and metaphoric at risk. The book's epigraph from Corinthians, "We are hard pressed on every side, but/ not crushed," aptly captures the collection's mix of duress and hope. The opening poem of the first section, "Time," begins: "Time never goes backwards,/ but the imagination must.// In the small grooves of a pinewood floor/ the recesses of footsteps/ worn by the pressures of a human life," elegantly evoking the meeting of the human and natural world. This theme is picked up in "Sleep," in which the speaker describes, "Dry earth, abundant/ hills that stretched the length of an imagination." Later in the poem, Shenoda writes, "I learned from my father,/ long before I ever understood/ what it meant to be a person on this earth// how one lives for moments that make our compass clear,/ give us enough view to see the next moment,/ and cultivate its gifts." This gorgeous book is full of captivating description and introspective wisdom.
