Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED

MY KINDRED, Paulann Petersen. Salmon Poetry Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2023, 108 pages, paper, $14.95, salmonpoetry.com.

I read My Kindred in August. I was sprawled on the guest bed in my friend’s daughter’s house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Everyone else was napping (baby, grandma, mama). I was basking in the light of Paulann Petersen’s poems claiming kinship with bees, plums, big-leaf maples, totems. Oh, and family.

I’m indebted to Petersen for such epigraphs as these:

—Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die. —Anaïs Nin

and this:

—One pound of honey contains the essence of two million flowers. 

The poems, too, are packed with honey, and surprise. A sister, “so full of yourself / when you’re rain” (“Her Sister Tells Water What’s What”). A poem titled, “Had the Matriarch Been Born a Bat.” A poem titled, “Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things.” Everything is related: a poem titled, “Whitman, Me, Hermes.” Petersen (like the bat with its umbrella-spine fingers) encompasses worlds. “Mythic, voluptuous” worlds, in the words of Kathleen Flenniken.

Here’s one poem to give you a sample:

Kinship

A few of our world’s people still speak
a tongue so old its closest analog
is birdsong. And a bird carved
some thirty thousand years ago
may well be our first work of art.

Why mimic the palaver of a thrush?
From wood or stone, why shape
a tern’s body, its wings pressed
tight against its sides? Or remember
the dream-moments our beating arms
took hold in air, lifting us away
from earth trod smooth by our feet?

We each possess a bird-soul.
On the highest branch of every family tree,
a winged spirit preens in the sun,
gleaming with iridescence—
that sheen of our common blood.

—Paulann Petersen

Petersen has an impressive biography, including being the Oregon poet laureate. I am indebted to Olympia Poetry Network’s Last Tuesday’s with Sandy for introducing me to her work. (And you, too, can check out OPN.)

To read more about Paulann Petersen, visit her website, or Poetry Foundation.