Learning the definition of a word sometimes makes a big difference. Take friluftsliv. I heard about the-now trendy Norwegian word early on this year and I’m not exaggerating when I say it greatly improved my attitude towards pared-down pandemic life. Friluftsliv translates to “open-air living” and means embracing the outdoors, no matter the weather. Just knowing the word motivated me to make friends with my former enemies, the wind and the cold.
I mention this because I’ve been spending a few days with other words, some also unfamiliar, and find that my connection to nature has deepened because of it. Holly Wren Spaulding’s latest collection of poems, Familiars, takes as it starting point words that The Oxford Junior Dictionary removed in recent years in the name of keeping pace with changing times. Fifty nature words were discarded in favor of more—unfortunately—familiar words to children. Chatroom for chestnut, cut and paste for catkin, bullet-point for bluebell—it’s a disheartening list. Spaulding writes in an author’s note that the removal shows “language seeming to symbolize and further the growing separation of humanity from the rest of nature.”
Spaulding scoops up the discarded words, dusts them off, and breathes life into them. The words and the poems they inspire become connective tissue between humans (“travelers” in the lingo of the book) and nature (“inhabitants”). The thirty-six poems in the book are titled with words not found in the children’s dictionary—bullock, adder, gorse, conker, to name a few—and though the poems are brief, some as short as a mere two lines, they’re as dense as walnuts, with much to discover inside.
Take “Heather,” here in its entirety:
Not a low fog above all.
The birth of mauve.
A paragraph of prose wouldn’t cover the story told here. And I’ll never experience a field of heather in the same way again.
The title itself, Familiars, works on two levels—both that each poem makes the unfamiliar familiar, and that each word represents an organism already familiar, that is, part of our earthly family.
As with any family, humor is always a reliable connector, like here in “Ox”—
Don’t think
I never wonder
what else I
might have been.
Poems are told from different points of view, human, vegetable and animal, divided into sections in the book. The third and final section, “Foretellings,” brings together all the voices in response to a future ecological disaster. But Spaulding is no dystopian poet. The collection closes out on a hopeful note of repair and healing with “Pansy”—
Ten thousand emissaries
blue, white, yellow, maroon—
an end to hostilities.
It’s no small thing to say the cover, like the book, is lush and gorgeous. The painting is called “Undergrowth” by Eliot Hodgkin. It’s so lovely you’ll want to leave the book laying about. That way you may find yourself picking it up often, finding the beauty within, re-connecting with family, creating the home you’ve always longed for.
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I asked my daughter to poem-elf two poems from the collection in northern Michigan where she lives and where Spaulding is originally from. I’ll feature those in my next post.
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Here’s a bio of Spaulding from a previous post
Holly Wren Spaulding’s connection to nature seems destined from the start. Her parents named her after a character called “Wren of the Woods” in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. She grew up in the woods in northern Michigan, off the grid in a “pretty 19th century style of life,” as she details in this podcast about her own creative development. The family homesteaded in an experimental collective living community where she and her siblings chopped wood and carried water.
She founded Poetry Forge, another sort of collective space, this one for poets. You can read more about her vision for the project and her personal history here. In the summer she teaches creative writing at Interlochen in northern Michigan, including a class she teaches with her mother, artist Carol Spaulding. She lives in Kittery Point, Maine with her family.
She’s been widely published in literary journals and nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She regularly collaborates with other artists, including this lovely project, a poetry-in-public-space installation called Urban Renga.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born the oldest of four in a small village forty-some miles southwest of Stonehenge. His father was a stonemason and fiddler. He was a sickly child and as an adult was a very small man, barely over five feet, a fact I mention because some compare the tiny thrush to Hardy himself.
May Sarton (1912-1995) was born in Belgium, the only child of an artist mother and an academic father who studied the history of science. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, the family fled to England, and then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There her father taught at Harvard.
I’ve never come across a poet with a more eventful life than Ko Un. Whatever could befall one human being—war, deafness, spiritual conversion, suicide, alcoholism, imprisonment, torture, literary stardom, and sadly, late-life accusations of sexual harassment and subsequent cultural “cancellation,” Ko Un has been through it. He’s a superstar (or was) in Korea but is only gradually becoming known outside his native country. For much of his life a repressive government prevented his work from being translated.
Miguel Algarín was born in Puerto Rico in 1941. His family moved to New York City in 1950. He got his bachelors from University of Wisconsin, his masters at Pennsylvania State University and his PhD in comparative literature at Rutgers, where he later taught Shakespeare.
Naomi Long Madgett was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1923, the youngest of three children and the only girl. Her father was a preacher. He took a job as pastor of a New Jersey congregation when Madgett was a baby. East Orange was a segregated town, and there she attended a school where prejudice prevented her from receiving the academic honors she had earned. When the family moved to St. Louis, she went to an all-black high school and was finally able to soar academically and artistically.
Nathan Zach was born in 1930 in Berlin. His father was German-Jewish, his mother Italian-Catholic. In 1936 the family re-located to what was then British controlled Palenstine.
Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943) was born in Vienna to ex-pat parents. The family moved back to the states when Guiterman was three. He graduated from City College of New York and worked as the editor for Women’s Home Companion and Literary Digest.