Review of Of the Earth and Other Desires by Megan
Muthupandiyan
League of Minnesota Poets ,February 2024, 58 pp.
$4.99 ebook
$11.95 paper
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About the book: With poems that arise at the intersection
among phenological study, place, and memory, Of the Earth and Other
Desires celebrates the locus poetica of our land communities and
explores what they have to teach those who move through them about desire. This
volume was awarded the John Rezmerski Manuscript Prize in 2023 by the League of
Minnesota Poets.
My Review
Deeply Emotive Cycle of Life Collection
The first time I read through this
amazing collection of poetry, I read with an electronic dictionary. The use of
Latin names of the poem’s subjects and geographical map points made each poem
even more mysterious. I wanted to unravel those mysteries and read them over,
taking delight when some point hit home for me in a different way with a fresh
read. From Muthupandiyan’s subtitle of A Poet’s Phenology to the last line of
the last poem, “I am here,” I was drawn into her cycle of natural phenomena. I
enjoy poetry but admit that I am not experienced enough to know form, so I
cannot speak to style, but I can speak to lyricism, and reaction—especially
reaction.
The act of blinking away the
feeling that I’ve been somewhere else came across strongly when I got to
“Visiting the Chicago Board of Trade.” I felt as though I was standing there,
looking up at the ceiling, where the art deco windows “exploded like sun rays.”
The reward, truly, was coming back to the floor and closing my mouth. Beginning
in January, the author takes the reader through the seasonal meanderings of the
changes that take place in the northern hemisphere, the Midwest, mostly around
42-45 degrees north; mostly 88 degrees west with occasional slides to 112
(Utah/Arizona) and to 9 (Spain). “The world is everything, and nothing more,”
we read and then move into maple buds that “season the blush bower of winter.”
Using lovely imagery, we see that braiding of compost and soil the farmers
create in spring, to the background blend of sandhill cranes.
Leading the reader along the
furrows of humanity—family—friendship—echoing the creation, we watch a child
grow and leave home, and of visiting another landscape with its own traditions,
to a land where slot canyons were carved by force and brightly burnished. By
high summer Muthupandiyan slices into varieties of knowledge: do we teach
relationships as well as identify the differences of malus domestica in
“The Same Fruit”? I enjoyed connecting our simple cinquefoil to “a clockwork of
forks winding up the lichened basalt” in “A Dance of Darwinian Proportions.”
You’ll want to watch the deer slide into shadow, “touch the wild carrots
steeped in winter,” and contemplate our world, our home.
Over half of these poems have
appeared in other recent poetry journals. The author has won numerous awards,
and self-defines as a “pilgrim, poet, and public humanities scholar who is most
at home…walking the world.” Her astute observations segue naturally into
engaging interpretive rhythms of language. The thinking poetry lover, those
unafraid to explore a different encounter with the natural world in its primal
iteration, those who soak up poetry and revel in lush combinations of
descriptors, will fall in love with Of the Earth and Other Desires.
About the Author: Meg
Muthupandiyan is a pilgrim poet, most at home when she is walking the world.
The founding director of Poetry in the Parks public humanities project, much of
her creative enterprise as an illustrator, essayist, and poet celebrates how
individuals' participation in their land communities fosters their ecological
consciousness.
