REVIEWS
Green, Poems by Emily Hiestand (Graywolf Press,1989)
Selected by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Award

National Poetry Award
Review by Jorie Graham

”The new vantage points of the physics of our time are alive in this poetry. It crackles like some source of energy we had no idea we had lived without and now, of course, would not.”

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San Jose Mercury News, October 15, 1989
Review by Frances Mayes

Dazzling, engaging — The two poets reviewed here point toward where I see poetry heading in the ‘90s. Emily Hiestand’s Green the Witch-Hazel Wood...is a dazzling, engaging book, wherein the chief pleasure is watching the play of Hiestand’s imagination and curiosity. Constantly, she swings from earth and the quotidian to space and the larger connections of nature... How things resemble and connect — or don’t — fascinates... her in many poems. She moves easily from the cosmic swirl to “the motion of a peach to become a pie.” (The collection is) a bountiful group of superb poems. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins and like her contemporary Patiann Rogers, Hiestand praises the diversity of the world.”

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Belles Lettres, Spring 1990
Review by Lee Upton

An unabashed play with language — “This poet aspires to a Wallace Stevens-like palette... The best poems experiment with scale, expanding and shrinking scenes until images achieve potency.... Unlike the endings of too many contemporary poems — poems that conclude with sighs, variously wistful or deflated — Hiestand’s poems end with images that reveal relationships.... Her interior world is countered by her focus on an exterior realm ...  A sensuality, an unabashed play with language... renders her work distinctive.”

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Partisan Review, Summer 1993
Review by Eavan Boland

”The remaking of nature poetry is always a challenge within a discourse. Emily Hiestand seems particularly fit for the challenge... (B)oth in Green the Witch-Hazel Wood and in her more recent poems from a forthcoming collection, she shows a rare, and sometimes two-edged, gift for irony... Her poems are full of (the) correspondences and yearnings she observed in Bishop’s. Her line is swift, with a lovely, citric vernacular about it. I admire this in particular about her work: a tone which is a powerful and gifted stylization within her wider themes. The pleasures of tone make the control in her nature poems a real mix of verve and intensity... These are wonderful gifts to find in poetry.”

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The Boston Review, October 1989
Review by Sharon Bryan

Language as continuous with the natural world — ”One of the most valuable things about Hiestand's poems is their vision of human life, and of its most characteristic feature, language, as continuous with the natural world. Here there is no romantic abyss, and no sentimentality. Love of what is other is grounded in knowledge rather than wishful thinking, and the knowledge is tempered by self–knowledge. This first collection of poems declares its attention to and affection for the natural world beginning with the title and the cover painting.... The opening epigraphs then define the tasks at hand: “If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred” (Chief Seattle) and “What we admire in the green world is a benign selfhood./ And in one another, the ability to speak of this. / Or better, to act it out.” (William Meredith, Dalhousie Farm). The poems themselves take up Meredith's challenge with wit, intelligence, curiosity, and obvious pleasure in the task at hand. Their attention to detail is both lavish and precise, in keeping with how much is at stake “If to render truly is to become...” (“In the Corner.”)

The poems simultaneously revel in and question the world of appearances, what we call the ‘real’ world...This world of the visible can become, under the right circumstances, conduit to the world of the unseen.... Though many of the poems conjure familiar scenes, they are far from any sort of naive realism. Their structuring is both a deliberate choice and a leap of faith....

The third section title, “The Pearly Eye,” summons up the eye that has done the close looking, but it turns out to be the name of a butterfly “whose wings / hold four dark purple eyes.” The poem it appears in “At the Pavilion, Newport,” describes the pavilion columns as “smooth carved, / ... like the full, clear face / we long to give the world” — and we can't help but hear the violence in “carved” and the hubris of personifying whatever we look at. The poem ends with what amounts to a prayer: “Can we breathe on the earth, / heroic and mild as the weak / dancing flight of the Pearly Eye?” The poems...are like containers filled slowly to the brim, and sometimes to overflowing. The patient accumulations gradually yield up insights and illuminations — more often in the form of questions than answers.”

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The Georgia Review, Spring Summer 1990
Review by Judith Kitchen

Defining, broadening the window of reason — “Emily Hiestand’s Green the Witch-Hazel Wood is a foray into logical thought, beginning  with the traditional logic of the mind where the world is questioned and observed. “Taking Pictures of Ducks” presents a conversation with the poet and Erasmus to raise the essential question: “Wise Erasmus, tell me this: / does the window of reason shutter the world?” Much of the rest of the book is an attempt to define, and broaden, that window of reason. To do so, Hiestand examines the world under a scientist’s microscope, somewhat reminiscent of Dickenson, Moore, and Bishop before her. 

There is a parallel logic of the senses. the dominant sense here is sight (Hiestand is also a visual artist) where objects are lovingly made palpable. Nouns are clean and simple — eggs and sofas and linoleum and the smell of kerosene. The known world sparkles and comes alive under her observant eye: “here is an orange that fits in the palm of your hand / with segments like maps, and sweet, and hard.”  Thus the first poem ends by offering us such an orange — and such a journey.

Sometimes the senses are turned upside down, subject to the probing questions of science itself. What is true? What is the nature of perception? Hiestand, at her best, discovers a new logic of the senses… [The] volume was selected by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Series, and it shows some of the same proclivity for abstraction and philosophy as Graham’s own work. This is an interesting turn of mind, and I find it refreshing... I take away a pocketful of prize marbles — lines I can’t forget, poems that haunt me long after the book is closed. The music from the ice-cream truck climbs over my “summer-cracked sills” as well as hers. When she looks through the “dizzy grid” of a screen door, I too see the sleepy air. Her “fluent molecules” rearrange my world.”