tender gravity

Description

tender gravity charts Marybeth Holleman's quest for relationship to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss-the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. "do not think," she says to her mother, "that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart." Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: "step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is." In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, we hear in Holleman's exquisitely attentive immersion clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.

Marybeth Holleman is author of The Heart of the Sound, co-author of Among Wolves, and co-editor Crosscurrents North, among others. Pushcart Prize nominee and Siskiyou Prize finalist, she's published in venues including Orion, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, and North American Review. She taught women's studies and creative writing at University of Alaska and held artist residencies at Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Denali National Park. Raised in North Carolina's Smokies, she transplanted to Alaska's Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound two years before the oil spill. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

"The poems range from kayak-level considerations of ocean life to close looks at a wetland sundew to views of the moon, comets, and the cosmos. They are, however, more than observations and celebrations of nature; they interrogate questions of life and death, responsibility to human and non-human beings, and the contradictions we all live with. "-Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News "Again and again Holleman interrogates humanity's preoccupation with itself, panning out to remind us that the larger world does not bother itself over these momentary matters. However, there is also a delicate emotional undercurrent running through tender gravity-Holleman is not simply reminding us about the death of glaciers and the warming of the planet. Gradually the poet permits a small glimpse into a personal tragedy-the loss of her brother, a victim of gun violence-and it becomes clear that she is taking solace in this larger sense of cosmic indifference." -- Erica Reid, The Colorado Review