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Dreaming in Grief by Mary Strong Jackson is a collection of poems rife with urgency and clarity including images of red-wing blackbirds atop marshy cattails, baby toads the color of sand, and a wren’s breath of silence illuminating the bounty we cannot lose. Her poems are a response to the climate crisis, and an urgent call for collective action by all citizens of this planet to come together and dream our way forward.
Jackson invites the reader to remember what we already know-we are not separate from nature, we are nature. As poet, Barbara Rockman comments,
These poems are warning and reverence, ode and prayer, that yearn to unravel the meanings of home and harbor. Like the Inuit woman Jackson depicts, who checks to see who is coming, this riveting collection goes out to see how faraway tomorrow is.
In this collection, Jackson asks the reader to consider how progress needs to be redefined in light of where we are today, and also to question what we genuinely want and require in our daily lives. How do our beliefs, and our accustomed ways of being affect our future and generations to come? What are we willing change and consider in our lives to protect animals, forests, oceans, deserts and prairies?
These poems encourage readers to acknowledge and grieve, but also to imagine, dream and hope, with images such as …not toad’s job to fix this hot and burning world… /it is toad’s job to grow and one day when his body temperature is just right, /he and his fellow toads will open their throats in song making music/ on beaches, in gardens, and deserts. /Day and night the toads sing/ until female toads with their own warty desires listen and arrive./ From song comes baby toads, tiny/exporters of charm…
Jackson writes of pelicans described as skinny-necked professors wearing orange galoshes with misplaced eyeglasses to fracking near million year-old rock layers of the Permian Basin, and a poet of worms who put his tongue on the worm just to feel compare/ to taste with no harm/ the dear wiggly thing/ to music that weaves through hair/ creates tiny shivers up a baby bird’s back/shakes snakes from winter skins..
Dreaming in Grief asks readers to read, talk, and respond to this existential crisis.
