Emily Hiestand - Green the Witch-Hazel Wood (National Poetry Series)

Written by Emily Hiestand. Themes include Poetry (Poetic Works By One Author).

From Library Journal

These poems, which won a National Poetry Series award for 1989, describe a crisp, clear vision of the world embracing a wide range of experience, detail, and circumstance. They are also deceptively simple--or rather they are written in deceptively simple, straightforward language--for what they bring to bear on the world they envisage is an intense and original poetic intelligence. This intelligence examines both the physical and the emotional qualities of much that surrounds us today. Though some of the poems are written from a strictly urban setting, all maintain a constant sensibility, giving a refreshing feeling of space, and thought, to each individual piece.
- Jessica Grim, Nypl
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

Poems deal with such topics as nature, family, love, childhood, friendship and life

From Publishers Weekly

Determined to extract pleasure and meaning from every experience, Hiestand looks for magic properties in familiar objects. Staring out the window of her apartment, she advises herself: "but be alert / as though you were seeing all new, / as Balboa awakened by the Pacific." Particularly in the impressive book's first section, the poems share the mechanisms of fairy tales: "The last summer we lived in a picture book," Hiestand says, and asks in all seriousness, "Is our cat in heaven?"; just as naturally, she refers to Dante or the philosophy of Spinoza. By the middle of the volume, princes depart from their storybook models and desert their maidens. In one of the final poems, "Birthday Party," enchanting imagery suddenly produces a forceful political statement, all the more potent given the innocence of the poet's vision. Hiestand manipulates words with uncommon playfulness and precision, and her enjoyment is highly infectious. Jorie Graham selected this first collection for the National Poetry Series.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Green the Witch-Hazel Wood...is a dazzling, engaging book, wherein the chief pleasure is watching the play of Hiestand's imagination and curiosity. Constantly, she swings from earth and the quotidian to space and the larger connections of nature...How things resemble and connect-- or don't--fascinates...her in many poems. She moves easily from the cosmic swirl to "the motion of a peach to become a pie." [This is] a bountiful group of superb poems. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins... Hiestand praises the diversity of the world." - -- -Frances Mayes, San Jose Mercury News, October 15, 1989

"Emily Hiestand's Green the Witch-Hazel Wood is a foray into logical thought, beginning with the traditional logic of the mind where the world is questioned and observed. "Taking Pictures of Ducks" presents a conversation with the poet and Erasmus to raise the essential question: "Wise Erasmus, tell me this: / does the window of reason shutter the world?" Much of the rest of the book is an attempt to define, and broaden, that window of reason. To do so, Hiestand examines the world under a scientistUs microscope, somewhat reminiscent of Dickenson, Moore, and Bishop before her.
There is a parallel logic of the senses. the dominant sense here is sight (Hiestand is also a painter) where objects are lovingly made palpable. Nouns are clean and simple--eggs and sofas and linoleum and the smell of kerosene. The known world sparkles and comes alive under her observant eye: "here is an orange that fits in the palm of your hand / with segments like maps, and sweet, and hard." Thus the first poem ends by offering us such an orange--and such a journey.
Sometimes the senses are turned upside down, subject to the probing questions of science itself. What is true? What is the nature of perception?
Hiestand's volume was selected by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Series, and it shows some of the same proclivity for abstraction and philosophy as Graham's own work. This is an interesting turn of mind, and I find it refreshing... I ta

Format: Paperback

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