Nina Bennett reviews Meghan Sterling's These Few Seeds

Meghan Sterling

These Few Seeds

Terrapin Books, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-947896-39-0

These Few Seeds is Meghan Sterling’s debut full-length poetry collection. The oil on wood panel cover art, snowmelt, is a unique way of advising readers that the world is changing. Indeed, many of the poems in this five-section book deal with climate change, or at least with the changing natural and social world we will leave our children. This theme is one many of us grappled with during the 60s and 70s, more concerned with social and political upheaval at that point than the changing natural world, but still struggling with what kind of world do we wish to leave our children. The theme of new parenthood is woven throughout.

“Morning Prayer,” the opening poem, sets the tone. The speaker tells us in the first line, “It is the beginning,” that this is the start of something. A new world of becoming parents, new names (Mother. Father.), new roles. An early reference perhaps to climate change:

It is the beginning when there was you and me and her

and the water that’s rising-

oceans, lakes, rivers, streams,

all rising on this morning

Along with the cover, this is the first of many references and images of water. Water sustains, nourishes, restores, and gives life to the natural world. Another image that gives the reader pause to marvel in nature is in the final lines of “California”:

Cherry flames ripping up the sides of whole mountains,

redwood forests ringed in mist.

Sterling bears witness to her Jewish heritage, which is as cultural a heritage as a religious one. The first poem in the second section shows this with the title, “Jew(ish).

In our home, small traces, only

“Codicil,” the poem that closes the third section, directly speaks to the world we are leaving our children. It’s a list poem full of anaphora, which, along with brief lines, propels the reader on. This thirty-line poem is unique in that it is a single sentence, lines not forced, easily spilling down the page. It starts:

To you, my daughter,

whose earth may not be my earth

And finishes with these exquisite lines:

To you I bequeath

all the courage

of birds and flowers,

water and stones,

to love enough,

to love with the toughness of trees.

The final poem, “Apology After the Fire,” is the title poem. It is an excellent summing up of the overarching theme of a changing natural world. The speaker talks of flowers grown “in the shade of the razed forests,” and describes how her daughter “knows the meagerness of water.” The poem closes:

I want life to bloom around her the way she blooms

and for her to know the quiet of leaves,

the hum of growing things,

these few seeds I nudge into flower as apology

Nina Bennett is the author of The House of Yearning, Mix Tape, and Sound Effects.

www.transcanalwriters.com