Appalachian Ground

Whether she is writing about the vixen she encountered at the close of day, listening to her beehives in the snow, or "the ordinary hush of moss on stone," Lisa Creech Bledsoe honors the sacred song of all things and illuminates each discovery with profound emotional insight. Following happily in the weeds behind Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and Jane Hirshfield, and influenced uniquely by her life in the Appalachian mountains as well as the fairy tales she grew up with, the author's writing style has an immaculate attention to the details of nature, an eagerness to blur the boundaries of real and imagined, and a call to become deeply grounded, where ever you are. Appalachian Ground exquisitely narrates encounters with salamanders, bones, crows, and rivers, and weaves in seven-league boots, bloody keys, and enchanted swans. There's both honesty and savagery in these well-crafted poems, and they also map the transformations that come over us as we immerse ourselves in nature. Primordial, ethereal, and utterly lyric, they never lose sight of the place of the sacred in the natural world. "The wrens and veeries will sing down the darkness creeping up your twigs and ligaments, and you cannot be unhealed," the author reminds us. "The unfurled universe claims you and presses down her favor."