Review by Jami Macarty

In the artemisia, national winner of the 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, poet and botanist William S. Barnes presents ecstatic love poems in the tradition of Sappho and Rumi. Like his predecessors, Barnes’s poems “sit in the light between” elegy and ode, expressing passionate love and desire. They honor the emotional experiences and “wild abundance” of mortal life, drawing “out from within” an upward reaching “sweetest song.”

In addition to lyric poetry, the domains of the artemisia are mythic, folkloric, and botanical. Artemisia refers to a hardy shrub known for its digestive benefits. In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister. She is the goddess of the moon and nature.

Barnes’s ode pays tribute to plants’ “brilliant canopies of leaves” and “chromatic range of green.” His elegy memorializes a “soulfriend.” Excerpts from her letters are interwoven with his lines to create a living dialogue. In these ways, the poems undulate between the “persistence” and “decay” of life: “I’m cut in two and all the leaves are coming out.”

Regardless of what “is nurtured,” whether “laughing or leaving,” every poem a “rising to meet” and “invite you in.” Barnes’s poems welcome us, hold our hands, and teach us. In “the veils (viola adunca),” the poet offers a plantsman’s “truth” as he describes the five-petaled dog violet:

“difficult to press. it is not possible to see the whole

without cutting. and this would make it something else.
the listener must infer what cannot be said.”

While acknowledging the challenge of conveying the deepest human emotions and truths in language, Barnes makes space for the mystery in words and expression, naming “themselves again” for us. The “leaning into” poems of William S. Barnes’s second collection are “evanescent” in their language and in their representation of life’s “pathway” as it “bends into the hills, across the contour, rising.”

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the artemisia by William S. Barnes. Inlandia Institute, April 2024.

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate’s debut and winner of Inlandia Institute’s 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, is to be “read as choreography,” marking “what led to this.” In her poems, Tate makes legible what is illegible about rejection as it concerns motherhood and miscarriage—rejection by a newborn of a mother’s breast and by a woman’s body of a fetus. What are the roles of nature and will? These poems “rage at who names a body,” acknowledge that a man and a woman “carry risk unevenly,” and ultimately recognize “the present carries multiples.” Memory and recovery, balance and counterbalance are important to these poems whose forms toggle between lullaby-like short lyrics and Proustian prose poems. Brevity and extension, lines and sentences, meditative and narrative counterbalancing elements “speak a language no known mother tongued.” Tate is a poet willing to sit with the complexity of human connection: “we seek comfort and reject it.” Her poems “swim against / the waves, held by / what resists,” and, it seems in so doing the grief-currents they swim transform into a “less insistent presence.” Isn’t that what loss eventually becomes? The Silk the Moths Ignore is a collection of lyric ache that brims with “artifacts of hope.”

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The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate. Inlandia Books, September 2021.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.

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