Nina Burokas Reviews "Leaning Toward Light" Edited by Tess Taylor
Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them
edited by Tess Taylor, Illustrations by
Melissa Castrillón
reviewed by Nina Burokas
We live in a divided society. We live inside climate change, ecosystem loss, mass extinction, and racial violence, in a global community gripped by famine, hunger, and war. The heaviest days are excruciating. Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth . . . can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-giving energy we need to go on.
The above excerpt from editor/poet Tess Taylor’s introductory essay, “Gardening in Public,” captures what it means to garden in these times. Reading this anthology is an immersion in a source of positive energy that is accessible to all of us, whether we tend a single plant or manage a production garden. Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them collects the experiences of ninety poets, testifying for gardening and its potential for renewal. As Mariana Goycoechea’s mother says in “Palm Sunday:” “La luna renews itself / & so can you.” In the depths of the pandemic, Taylor observed that as she tended the garden, it tended back. And being outside, in pickup conversations with neighbors, she saw “how gardens help us nourish both the soil and one another.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Foreword is framed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s idea that “the whole world is a garden.” That is, a garden isn’t a discrete place, “growing is all around us, connecting us, influencing not only our relationship with the outdoors, but our sense of self.” One of the unique aspects of this anthology is the visibility it brings to historically underrepresented gardeners: specifically, people of color, mothers, and children. To paraphrase Nezhukumatathil, what better way to cultivate appreciation and a sense of ”infinite possibility” than with hands deep in the soil? And to see oneself represented is both invitation and validation.
Leaning Toward Light follows the seasons—activities in and of the garden—from Planting and Sprouting through Wintering & Turning Again. Being & Waiting is a section title that resonates on its own. Sections also speak to how the garden works on us: Grieving & Release, for example. Each section is introduced by a poet, who shares a seasonal thought or experience and recipe—recipes that will have you yearning for harvest, remembering or anticipating the scent of tomato vines, the waft of herbs, the perfume of fruit trees in bloom. On my short list: Feta, Tomato & Basil Pie.
Tess Taylor: “Gardens are what hope looks like in public.” The poems in this collection are the harvest of that hope: abundant, joyful, necessary.
The imagery is vivid throughout: Melissa Castrillón’s illustrations and the poets’ language reflect imagination, insight, and humor. In “Photosynthesis,” Ashley M. Jones shares her father’s passion for gardening: “I am convinced the earth speaks back to him / as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening. / The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow, / my father speaks sun and water into the earth, / we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.” In “The Contract,” Jane Hirshfield follows through on pruning advice: “. . . my hands move quickly, / adding their signature branch by branch, / agreeing to loss.” In “Interview with the Pear Tree,” Genine Lentine asks “What is your process?” The tree responds: “I let the leaves / come to the branch / and when the bee is at the / blossom, I listen.” In Federico Garcia Lorca’s “August,” “The ear of corn keeps / its laughter intact, yellow and firm.”
In the depths of Winter, I leaned into these poems. In January, I recited an excerpt from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s “Three Sunflower Seeds:” “patience / I say to the empty vase / my heart”—like my grandmother would finger her rosary. As I plotted where to place bare root trees, I heard this excerpt from Lauren Moseley’s “Planting Inkberry Hollies During the Pandemic” play in my head: “How far apart should we plant them? / At least six feet // And how close? / Within twenty but not around a corner // They need to see each other / To talk to each other.”
Sometimes, what we need is a moment of attention, of appreciation, as in Ellen Bass’ “Sous-Chef:” “With all that’s destroyed, look / how the world still yields a golden pear.” Or in “Black Cherries,” W.S. Merwin saying to himself “Remember this.” Sometimes, we just need to focus on essentials, as Jason Myers expresses in “Closing In:” “I do not want to be any busier / than my basil plant, swallowing the sun, / the soil, the errant water.” In “From Separation Anxiety,” Janice Lee says “trust me // getting down on your knees / would do you some good / hold the intention in your belly / then, / look around / rather than / ahead.” In “Mara Mara, Garden Child,” Claudia Monpere also focused on the now:
It’s now. I want every child
to fill gaps with carrots to shape a shrine of soil
and sky, to sail
sadness far, far away . . .
In these pages, there is also a reckoning that transcends the season. Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact” seemingly halting start is deceptive; there is a quiet momentum that drives the reader to its devastating conclusion. If I could channel only one poem, it would be Czeslaw Milosz’s “Gift:”
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I know no one worth envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass
me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
There is reassurance in working with the soil, focusing on what we can do, can fix. Taylor reminds us that “the broken world we inherit can be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending.” In “November, Remembering Voltaire,” Jane Hirshfield seconds that thought: “with no invented God overhead, / I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting / that ripens the soil.” Erita Meitner brings the idea full circle in “Ghost Eden,” referencing “the dirt from which we are formed / and crushed and formed again.”
This collection is not only a celebration of gardens, but of gardeners. It is an acknowledgement that gardening is a choice, a value judgment. In “Trying,” Ada Limón muses “. . . some days I can see the point / in growing something, even if / it’s just to say I cared enough.” Jericho Brown turns up the emotion in “Foreday in the Morning:”
. . . I love my mother. I love black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the
blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who
tend them
Are already at work. . . .
/ / / / /
. . . My God, we leave
things green.
Gardeners are optimists, willing to invest and play the odds. I planted bare root trees and bulbs last weekend, when the chance of frost (last 32°) was down to 50%. I lost that bet, but it looks like the plantings are holding their own. As Michelle Gillett puts it in “Daffodils:” “Three hundred bulbs / / Three hundred odds against weather.” Taylor closes her introductory essay with the statement, “Gardens are what hope looks like in public.” The poems in this collection are the harvest of that hope: abundant, joyful, necessary. May we all, as Maw Shein Win phrases it in “Thistle,” “[bend] toward light / despite the all.”
Nina Burokas is a writer and educator working on the production of her first poetry chapbook. She lives on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where she’s restoring a woodland prairie on the traditional land of the Chemakum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam and Suquamish People. An adjunct business instructor at Mendocino College in California, Nina has been a contributing author/editor for five digital business titles.
Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them,
Edited by Tess Taylor
Foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Illustrations by Melissa Castrillón
Storey Publishing, 210 MASS MoCA Way,
North Adams, MA 01247
Tel: 413-346-2100
Website: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tess-taylor/leaning-toward-light/9781635865806/
Email: storey_feedback@hbgusa.com
ISBN 978-16358658-0-6 (Hardcover)
2023, hardcover, 200 pages, $22.00