dandelion, by Heather Swan 

Madison poet and nonfiction writer Heather Swan is an important voice in contemporary environmental literature, with four acclaimed books to date. Her luminous poetry collection, dandelion, walks a knife-edge between love and loss, both personal and global: the wonder and desolation of an increasingly damaged natural world and her journey through mourning toward healing after losing her father to Parkinson’s. Aldo Leopold wrote in the 1940s that to be an ecologist “is to live always in a world of wounds”; there is deep grief for the natural world in this book, but also joy and awe for what still is, despite the harm we humans have wrought. Swan shows us a world made all the more precious for being imperiled, one where love is clarified and intensified by death.

The opening poem, “Invitation,” conjures the forest as a sacred space “beyond the noise / of industry and ego,” but nature here is not prettified. It contains “blood of the sparrow / blood of the shrew.” The greenworld is both profoundly restorative—essential to our survival on both the physical and the spiritual level—and plagued by flames and floods, melting glaciers, pesticides that sicken the poet’s baby daughter, the looming “abyss of extinction.” “How much damage can we sustain?” asks Noah’s wife in a moving section that imagines her reflections from the Ark.

Many of the poems take place on or near water. Crucially, images of permeability recur throughout the book. The notion that all things are interconnected is the central tenet of ecology and this poet’s credo. “Only by dissolving / this mask / of separation, / by becoming / porous enough / can we / begin to fill, / to belong.” Swan writes vividly of threshold moments at twilight, when boundaries become blurred, moments when the speaker is transformed by her interaction with her surroundings, dissolved into something greater: “no I, only we, untethered to me.” 

Another recurrent theme is kinship, not only with the father, daughter, son, husband, and friends who appear but with all beings—muskrat, carp, antelope, lichen, birds, sharks, elephants—even tomato seeds and stars: “all of us of a kind.”

There is a gorgeous physicality in Swan’s writing. “Lie down in a field of lavender. / Drizzle honey on your tongue”, allow bees to “seduce your wrists,” she writes in “How to Capture a Swarm” (she is a beekeeper as well as author, teacher, and international researcher). Elsewhere she writes of “the frog’s throaty vibrato / pouring like liquid / into you.” The poems are always anchored in the body, this body—the only one we have, “briefly / so very briefly,” as the last poem, “Gleam,” reminds us. 

What comes through strongest in this book is a depth of love—for family, friends, the creatures and plants, the lakes and rivers, and for this astounding, multifarious, impossibly beautiful and endangered world. It is the ability to see ourselves as connected to all life that allows us to move forward at times of loss and grief. In the stunning second poem, “While the World Burned On,” the speaker is on a lake at dusk listening to her companion recount a son’s death, when suddenly a squadron of geese explode through the gathering dark like messengers from the beyond: “the geese pulling us forward / as they did the impossible— / not stopping, but flying on together, / though the air was thick with dread / and there was so very little light.” Later in the book, after the father’s death, the geese appear overhead again, this time at dawn, circling over the two women before flying north, signaling a release or redemption: “I knew, then, you were free.” 

Even in dark times, Swan reminds us, “There will be stars / caught in the water; // let your dark eyes / mirror that shine.” 

In September, the Washington Island Literary Festival is pleased to include Heather Swan on the program. In addition to speaking, whe will give a poetry workshop on September 19 at 10 am. Dandelion is available at Fair Isle Books and Gifts. 

This article is part of a series of reviews featuring authors who will participate in the Washington Island Literary Festival, September 18-20.  This year’s theme is “Holding Time.”