“An act of communion.” —YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
“If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home.
The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that “we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating “a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”
Industry Reviews
Praise for Pictograph "These poems have brought me to my knees, a new catechism founded on the breath of ochre and stone. Among the careful script of the ancients, Melissa Kwasny's vision has superbly located what it means to be human. What it means to seek answers, to mark the passage of time, and to leave behind remnants of hope for those to come. Through these poems of cosmic examination, we are reminded again and again that we were here. And we remain." --M.L. Smoker "In Melissa Kwasny's Pictograph each prose poem is a compass that locates us within intimate natural details up close, never blurring the emotional optics of acute revelations. These praise songs turn a keen eye to the elemental made spiritual--the gift of breathtaking focus. Here, the pictographs and petroglyphs are alive with celebratory observation that connects to the good earth. We feel exactly what the speaker means when she says, "As if you knew I would understand this as approval." But we are also held accountable for what we witness. Indeed, Pictograph is an act of communion through deep seeing and singing, and every glimpse rewards us. --Yusef Komunyakaa "'What is form but the reigning in of our desire?' asks poet Melissa Kwasny. 'Do our dreams prepare us for our eventual deaths?' Part elegy, part ontological meditation, part fierce celebration of nature's relentless evanescence, these luminously stunning poems interrogate what it means to be human--the profound yearning and profound spirituality of both human observation and human expression. In a gorgeous palimpsest, poems emerge in concert with ancient pictographs, only to become transformed into pictographs in and of themselves; pictographs in which nature emerges in concert with the poet as a creator of pattern, color, and sign--marking its images upon the poet, who in turn leaves her unforgettable imprimatur upon the reader. After reading Pictograph, I feel myself forever inscribed by the timeless art of these poems." --Lee Ann Roripaugh
