Pictograph

by Melissa Kwasny

Overview

The prize-winning poet evokes the spirit of nature in this collection inspired by the sacred sites around her rural Montana home.

“If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites across Montana.

In Pictograph, she captures the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging.

Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that “we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating “a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319081
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	540 KB

About the Author

Melissa Kwasny is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Nine Senses, Reading Novalis in Montana, Thistle, and The Archival Birds. Widely published in journals, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, and the Boston Review, Kwasny is also the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Award, as well as the 2009 Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, among numerous other prizes and residencies. She lives outside Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

Editorial Reviews

02/16/2015
“Remember that you are a gesture, a salt and water drum, in resonance with the personal and the ancestral,” writes Kwasny (The Nine Senses) in one of the 60 prose poems that compose her fifth collection, a meditation on nature, humanity, history, and art. Kwasny situates her poems among the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites of Montana’s Elkhorn Mountains, but travels widely in both physical and psychic space: “We who are rock, are moving now, though we are supported by bone.” The work combines ekphrasis, philosophy, and ecological thinking with flights of personal lyric. “Ten thousand years ago, the glaciers melted, and now the coal’s for sale,” she reminds readers. “To hold onto one’s form, is that so important?” The poet’s strength is in letting these various fields give way to each other with ease, connecting them to the larger arc of human history, and allowing the divisions between human and nature to give: “We were grazing, then running, then the ground, which is all we know, suddenly opened up and betrayed us.” Kwasny is able to summon the history and emotional intensity of her subjects, connecting both herself and her readers to nature and time alike. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Pictograph

"These poems have brought me to my knees, a new catechism founded on the breath of ochre and stone. Among the careful script of the ancients, Melissa Kwasny’s vision has superbly located what it means to be human. What it means to seek answers, to mark the passage of time, and to leave behind remnants of hope for those to come. Through these poems of cosmic examination, we are reminded again and again that we were here. And we remain."
—M.L. Smoker

"In Melissa Kwasny’s Pictograph each prose poem is a compass that locates us within intimate natural details up close, never blurring the emotional optics of acute revelations. These praise songs turn a keen eye to the elemental made spiritual—the gift of breathtaking focus. Here, the pictographs and petroglyphs are alive with celebratory observation that connects to the good earth. We feel exactly what the speaker means when she says, “As if you knew I would understand this as approval.” But we are also held accountable for what we witness. Indeed, Pictograph is an act of communion through deep seeing and singing, and every glimpse rewards us.
—Yusef Komunyakaa

“‘What is form but the reigning in of our desire?’ asks poet Melissa Kwasny. ‘Do our dreams prepare us for our eventual deaths?’ Part elegy, part ontological meditation, part fierce celebration of nature’s relentless evanescence, these luminously stunning poems interrogate what it means to be human—the profound yearning and profound spirituality of both human observation and human expression. In a gorgeous palimpsest, poems emerge in concert with ancient pictographs, only to become transformed into pictographs in and of themselves; pictographs in which nature emerges in concert with the poet as a creator of pattern, color, and sign—marking its images upon the poet, who in turn leaves her unforgettable imprimatur upon the reader. After reading Pictograph, I feel myself forever inscribed by the timeless art of these poems.”
—Lee Ann Roripaugh

From the Publisher

04/15/2015
Award-winning poet Kwasny (The Nine Senses) makes us look, really look, at the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites near her Montana home, which she describes in lush but exacting detail while reminding us that we're but "a thumbprint in the cliff." These prose poems then keep opening up into discussions of light and sight, death and aging ("What is form but the reining in of desire"), loneliness and solitude, and "blackbirds falling right out of the skies while we lobby for still more concealed weapons." Beautifully coherent and immensely satisfying.

Library Journal