Alison Hawthorne Deming's spare, luminous sixth poetry collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, takes readers across the world: a farmer's market in Arizona, a small Canadian island, a handful of archeological sites in Greece. In each place, Deming considers the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, as well as the intricate interconnections among nonhuman living things. "Old birches lead complicated lives," she notes in "Encountering Trees," describing the ways trees can support and strengthen other organisms. She writes of bumblebees learning "how to handle a flower" in "Field Studies" and, elsewhere, of a startling encounter with an onyx-eyed deer.
But Deming's reflections go beyond mere appreciation of nature: she examines the effects of human presence (and politics) on all sorts of landscapes, such as Cuba in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's death and an abandoned dulse camp whose "tidal pull" is "deeper than all the history/ that produces flags." She turns her steady gaze onto the scars of human activity, but she refuses to give into despair: her optimistic "Letter to 2050" imagines the healing of a river ecosystem, and "The Bog" celebrates renewal after a flood, noting, "it is the way of the world to mend." The collection's last poem, "Dear America," pleads with the U.S. to "let your civil war go" and to "quiet them, the voices/ that deceive." Deming's poetry offers a hopeful alternative: "a pond gone fugue/ in autumn" twilight, an orchard's worth of tart wild apples, and the nuanced, ongoing work of care for people and planet. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams