A celebration of gardening in new poetry anthology
To tend a garden is to engage with hope, that this seed, pressed into the dirt, will rise and grow. It is to engage with nourishment, resurrection, beauty, and other real things of this world: sun, soil, rain, seasons. A new poetry anthology edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor celebrates gardening and the garden in a sweeping variety of contemporary poems. “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them” (Storey) is a rich and varied collection that follows the yearly cycle, planting to harvest. Poets include Jericho Brown, C. D. Wright, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, and Sholeh Wolpé, among many others. Local poet January Gill O’Neil writes of wild oregano in winter, “this one-plant wrecking crew/ encroaching… in a shimmering wave of language,/ of green-speak.” Roseanna Warren writes of the end of the flowering season: “In tangled/ conclave, spiky-/ leaved, they/ wait. The news/ is fatal.” Nezhukumatathil writes in praise of “the caked-up trowel, hand rake,/ and grass scissor.” In “After All,” Anna V. Q. Ross asks the hard questions: “couldn’t we have tried harder? Predicted/ the week of heat when the spinach bolted,” as she looks at what lives and what doesn’t and why in a poem of deep and quiet force. There is earth and joy and comfort and death in these poems, as there is in the garden every year. Local contributors Ross, O’Neil, Kirun Kapur, Brian Simoneau, along with editor Taylor, will read on Sept. 12 at 6 p.m. at the Boston Public Library.