"Berries"
from Melissa Kwasny's
Thistle

Melissa Kwasny:

Melissa Kwasny is the author of a book of poetry, The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press, 2000), and editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800 – 1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). She has also published two novels, most recently, Trees Call for What They Need. Ms. Kwasny lives in Jefferson City, Montana.

About Thistle:

The Idaho Prize 2005
Selected by Christopher Howell

"Melissa Kwasny's poems are so exact in their movement and presentation, so fresh in their botanical and observatory language, they invoke for the reader, with aching clarity, what it would be like to be brave enough to touch both the inner and outer worlds simultaneously, and with identical honesty and care. There is a weird, luminous parallax, too, that descends as one reads these poems, as though the spirits of Hopkins, Dickinson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had combined to possess a poet with post-modern perspective and craft. And so one sees and enjoys anew the great tradition of meditative poetry in our language: a gift of staggering proportions. It is difficult for me to express my admiration and enthusiasm."
— Christopher Howell, Final Judge, The Idaho Prize for Poetry 2005

"These thirty-seven poems are eccentric in the true meaning of the word – off-center. Their titles, bearing the names of weeds, flowers, herbs, trees, are merely points of departure. 'How hard can it be,' the poet asks, 'to lie down in the green / mussed bed of the senses... In clover.' Whether it's clover or rue, aspen or moss, the reader is invited into that rumpled but rich bed."
— Maxine Kumin

"As nearly all our great poets tell us, it is by attending scrupulously to other that we best understand ourselves. So it is that in Melissa Kwasny's tender, brilliantly described encounters with the vegetable world we see, in the midst of the most respectful observations of each beloved species – whether it be tree lichen, kinnikinnick, wild rose, human being, or rue – great depths of world and self knowledge. One benefit of such reverent scrutiny is the courage finally to ask, as Emily Dickinson herself might have asked, one of the biggest 'what if's' of all. For if, as in Kwasny's 'Shrinking Violets,' 'the largest animal in the world is God', and, later, 'There are no words / for my transgressions, only the space / between leaving one god for another, / a male for a female', then, naturally, she may ask, 'What if the sibyl called the voice of God her own?'
— Patricia Goedicke

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