Kimberly Blaeser’s latest collection of poems, Ancient Light, is a gift to the world of poetry. These well-crafted poems leap off the page, nestle under our bones and sing to us.
A generous poet, we understand her concerns throughout whether we are in a memory or she is sharing something with us we should know.
From the epitaph, we the reader understand we are in the hands of a master poet with wide ranging concerns, “In memory of those lost to the pandemic and centuries-long plague of violence. May our communities heal.”
Throughout the collection Kimberly uses Anishinaabemowin alongside English adding to the music of the poems. In the first poem, “Akawe, a prelude,” she grounds us and lets us know that we stand, “Between languages…” and prepares us for what will unfold, “How song names the shattered, shifts gravity.”
In all three sections, there are many poems that begin with, “The way we love something small.” These poems link and ground us, and signal to the reader, ‘Here is something important; pay attention and slow down.’ These became my favorites, each unique on the page. They utilized white space, art, or images with words. It felt like an aesthetic of the poet and artist’s [two different people?] own [each?] making something new and unique.
There are poems of loss and remaking, a reclamation of language, culture, narration, history, and land. In numerous poems, we have a window into the poet’s early life and relatives. Some are narrative, and some elliptical. But all are impactful, personal, and even joyous. In “Grace Notes,” the last line is a prime example of this joy: I am music, an angled bow, a banjo pluck.
The poem, “An Old Story,” is also a favorite not just for its tale, but because here the poet breaks the wall and says to us, “The story lifts itself out of a place I understand.” Then the poem resumes its pace, but the poet has used a double space twice here and the words “out of” are on their own in the middle of the sentence, the action mimics the interruption and makes the poem stronger.
I want to close with the last two lines of the poem, “As If My Now Gloved Hands Were Secrets,” because it ends on hope, and we all need more of this in our life right now:
As if flood of wetlands were an allegory for hope.
As if we were seeping close closer—nodistance.
