Bones About to Bloom

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Shari Andrews’s first book drew on written archives and memories of
old people living in New Denmark. In her second book, Andrews expresses
a consciousness of natural time as dawn becomes daylight, seasons pass,
and the life cycle moves us from birth to death. Her vocabulary is
simple and unaffected, yet the depth of her connection with nature is
explicit in the metaphors she creates.

The book is divided into four untitled parts. In Part 1, “Summer
touches [the poet’s] bare arms and legs like warm fingertips. It
speaks in the language of birds, crickets and streams.” In Part 2,
lightning leers through a window, while the moon is a “voyeur whose
stare / turn[s] skin to goose-flesh.” In Part 3, the poet is awakened
by “A blade of light / [which] slits the drifting canoe of sleep.”
In Part 4, there is the recognition that “Out of some kind of darkness
/ an owl circles. / It is the spread wings of light. Twilight, a liminal
time, approaches. Surely this is the ease that was intended, / the grace
given freely.”

Even amid the panic of a traumatic incident involving a child, the poet
recognizes that focusing on the details and stability of nature—the
green lawn, the trees beyond—is a way to feed her soul.