Earth Words
Conversing with Three Sages
Poems exploring what three writers from the past can tell us about our relationship to the planet.
Description
The leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through / only one side of each.
If “poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead,” as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr.
Though the environmental and political problems of the twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with similar challenges. Wang’s writings embody an ideal relationship between self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an antidote to our age’s dependence on digital forms of communication. He also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present. Carr’s writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the impulse to creatively express one’s being runs through the entire natural world.
Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.
Reviews
"'I've been searching for you, teacher,' John Reibetanz writes to Wang An-shih; 'Walk with me, Henry,' he addresses Thoreau; and to Emily Carr, 'Fast forward on your part, rewind on mine.' With great humanity and astonishing control of craft, Reibetanz invites his readers into cross-generational encounters with three 'seers.' Each poem is both a superb glosa and an invitation to learn what unites us with these lives of vastly different sensibilities, challenges, and dangers. With a light touch and a careful aesthetic, Reibetanz responds to his encounters with exquisite small tracts of lightness, beauty, and wisdom." Maureen Hynes, author of Sotto Voce
"Thirty years after P.K. Page brought the glosa to our collective dazzled attention, John Reibetanz takes a poetic form that is inarguably the one most enthusiastically appropriated by many Canadian poets and makes it abundantly his own. A verse strategy designed to bring one poet into intimate, if brief, conversation with another is given the page-turning sweep of intellectual narrative in three multi-glosa dialogues between Reibetanz and Wang An-shih, Henry Thoreau, and Emily Carr. As in all meaningful, lifelong one-on-ones, his exchanges with his reclusive mandarin, bushwhacking Transcendentalist, and rainforest mystic are pensive, polemical, humourous, lyrical, confiding, philosophical, and generously searching. A lifetime of reading, deep thinking and profound appreciation makes the glosas in Earth Words the most remarkable poems in Reibetanz's already impressive career." John Barton, author of Lost Family: A Memoir