Description:
"A powerful, eerie book." --CECILIA VICUÑA
In this inspired collection, acclaimed poet and translator Jody Gladding takes the physical, elemental world as her point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape, and deriving a lexicon for these poems from the rich offerings of the world around her.
In some poems, Gladding steps into the role of translator, interpreting fragments left by bark beetles or transcribing raven calls. In others, poems take the form of physical objects--a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather--or they emerge from a more expansive space--a salt flat at the Great Salt Lake, or a damaged woodlot. But regardless of the site, the source, or the material, the poet does not position herself as the innovator of these poems. Rather, the objects and landscapes we see in Translations from Bark Beetle provide the poet with both a shape and a language for each poem. The result is a collection that reminds us how to see and to listen, and which calls us to a deeper communion--true collaboration--between art and the more-than-human world.
Review Quotes: Advance Praise for Translations from Bark Beetle
In her latest collection, Stegner Fellow and Yale Younger Poet Gladding sets out to interpret the world for us; what, for instance, are we to make of the marks left by the bark beetle--or an egg or a feather or the Great Lakes? Her language is refreshingly forthright and punchy.--Library Journal Praise for Jody Gladding "Jody Gladding's poems are original, beautiful, and fierce, sometimes enigmatic, but never gratuitously, only faithfully so. They bring to their world (our world) a unique mix of light, lightness, and depth: a world in which human feeling is not all the author's concern--but more rare, like the human face in Bernifal."
--Jean Valentine Jody Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems.
--Laurie Sheck