Seeds
$21.95
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$21.95
Regular price
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Alice James Books
Seeds
$21.95
Sale price
$21.95
Regular price
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The Seeds confronts the ecological paradox of homemaking in an environment domesticity rejects--one of mess, disease, and everyday violence--to explore the equal distress and delight entangled in caring for a family, a new home, and the earth that sustains them.
Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity's power to alter nature and powerlessness to control it: an epiphyte's fall from a live oak, an urban creek's response to drought, or a roof rat's nest-building in the attic of the poet's home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth, and as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature's intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather.
The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks' third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.
Book Details
- Publisher:
- Alice James Books
- ISBN:
- 9781949944891
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Pages:
- 100
- Authors:
- Cecily Parks
- Published Date:
- 2025-10-14
- Language:
- English
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About Cecily Parks
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The Seeds: Poems by Cecily Parks opens and closes with the hackberry. In the first poem, we see the tree through the speaker's stuck window and learn that "Because of its crowded / easily broken branches, the hackberry is trash," or so claims an arborist who offers to remove it. Of course, it stays in the yard of a family who appreciates its shade. A good setup for a collection that admires nature, and the sort of wild "trash" of humanity... we get to know the landscape, its occupants, both plant and human in this Texas neighborhood. Parks has a gift for long poems, some span three to five pages, allowing the words to breathe and give a welcome depth of context. The prose poem series, "Dispatches from the Alley" elevate an oft overlooked space. There's a bit of Thoreau here, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, when Parks writes: "When I came to the alley, I wanted to discover that it holds up the neighborhood like a spine," written as only the lover of liminal spaces can see it. I should mention: Parks nails short poems, too: "Lightening Rhyme", "Mother Cardinal Rhyme" and "Front Yard Rhyme" are pocket-perfect. The collection ends on the eve of the hackberry's removal, the speaker praising it one last time: "Some people call a hackberry / a junk tree or trash tree, / throwing shade. I love the tree's shade, and now / it will be gone". Parks leaves us with the vision of a room disappearing.