Swallowed Light. By Michael Wasson

Abstract

Sometimes a collection of poems reads like a beautiful field guide. This is true of Michael Wasson’s latest collection, Swallowed Light, which not only includes beautiful images wrought in careful lines, but also helps us understand who we are by understanding the history of where we are. We need poems as guides and reminders. We need poems that help us see and resee. And we need poets like Michael Wasson to help us do both. Swallowed Light proves once again that Indigenous voices are essential to understanding the complexity of land through its history, the culture that still lives in it, and the language born of it. In lines that are both arresting and sharp, Wasson reminds us that the stories in the rock, such as that shared in “Ant & Yellow Jacket” predate colonization and, in fact, refuse it. Consider, for example, lines from “Ant & Yellow Jacket” in which the struggle between the two beings, which converges in “a single/mouthed arch/of basalt,” parallels the struggles that exists within the speaker, with dueling cultures, and concerning land ownership: “Feel how alive/your skin is/how these lips/now lock yours:/when does/the breath finally/vanish … [?]” (14).