In Monarchs Fly Great Distances, Barbara Wuest traces the paths of the contemplative walker, the migratory flight of the butterflies, the travels of the Infant Jesus of Prague, and the intersecting paths of a mother and a daughter, as their lives unfold in the Midwest and in California. The speaker in these poems is a spiritual seeker, one who asks how she might best attend both to the beauty of the natural world and to the immanence of the divine in that beauty. In view of the fragility of their brightly colored wings, the butterflies’ transcontinental migration is almost impossible to imagine. Like the butterflies, the wax-covered statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague makes an improbable journey, traveling from Spain to Prague to Munich back to Prague again, witnessing hundreds of years of political upheaval and religious devotion. In these luminous and contemplative poems, human bodies too are shaped by their frailties, joys, and travels, and the suffering they have both witnessed and survived. Mapping these intricate lines, this collection considers how the memories of girlhood shape the mind and movements of the woman, how the contours of home can shift and change, and how they nonetheless always retain traces of childhood’s version of that place. -Faith Barrett, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Duquesne University. Author of To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. As whenever I finish reading a collection by Barbara Wuest, I want her work to be in the hands of as many as possible. It is especially so with Monarchs Fly Great Distances. The tender command of word and world in this collection will break and repair all hearts too familiar with the power of time. Wuest’s juxtaposition of the contemplative body, humble with origin, with the outbursting of mind in flight to place, variously recalled, together with an effortlessly precise execution of the poetic line, make symphonies, liturgies, blues and folk music of one’s song. The central image of the monarch moves far beyond cliche of transformation into the terror of the ordinary self courting and possessing extraordinary understanding. The traveling mind, a-buzz with detail and meaning, alights upon, for terrifyingly beautiful moments, a recalled leaf or a glass rim, and knows change. This, and everything I say is recall, the poet asserts. Pinwheels, too on the graves of adults, Blue Angels in airshows, and Muddy, recall perfect blue of the intellect. In this powerful collection and its physics of forward flight, we find comfort in the endeavor to center oneself in each turbulent moment of recall, even as each centering moment displaces us: As a digger unearths more places for the dead / my own deep rest shakes another place loose. The details of one’s life singularly rendered in this perfect collection will bring many of us home.
-Lisa Isaacson, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Zayed University.
