Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower

In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Alison Hawthorne Deming’s new collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, is a rich catalog of the Anthropocene, including history, research, and initiative. In the tradition of Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Pattiann Rogers––Deming pays extraordinary attention to the natural world. With skillful use of scientific detail, music, place, and the power of naming things, she sounds an alarm and a call to action. Moving deftly from the short lyric to the long narrative to prose: ‘each word an act / of defiance against the unspeakable.’ Poem after poem reads like a ‘little locus of beauty to counter the decay.’ This collection is an homage to naturalists and explorers, to environmental consciousness, to curiosity and to service––it is a lyric acknowledgment of the delicate balance of life.”
—Ellen Bass, author of In Indigo

“Alison Hawthorne Deming is not a poet for whom environmental writing is merely a subject or an aspect of her brand. For this true poet, nature is nothing less than a beyond-one’s-own-life existential presence.  As with Merwin, Snyder, and Hillman, I read Deming’s complex work both for its powerful engagements with nature and the vivifying inventions of its music. Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower provides us such abundance: vigilance but also awe, documentation alongside discovery, and formal designs that range from quantitative syllabics to the open fields of free verse and prose poetry.  In the end Deming’s artful strategies are—as in areas as diverse as physics, sociobiology, and grammar—deeply relational.  Each ‘chatter, dirge, thesis, and psalm’ is what it is in vital symbiosis with the rest.”
—David Baker, author of Whale Fall