Book of poetry helps gardeners make it through winter

HEART OF THE FLOWER, Poems for the Sensuous Gardener, edited by Sondra Zeidenstein, Chicory Blue Press, 103 pages, $13.95.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts …

Oh my God, what am I/that these late months /should cry open/

In a forest of frost … — from Sylvia Plath’s “Poppies in October”

Seems we can never save enough summer, scramble as we do to preserve it in freezers and jars, photographs and words, hoping to hold something of its flavor and fragrance to nourish our sensory and spiritual appetites through months of killing cold.

Put this book on your gift list for yourself or others who relish saved spice from the garden: potpourri, pomanders, poems! It’s a first-of-its-kind harvest from and for gardeners “who cannot, even in season, get enough … through eyes, nose, fingertips, knees or back, and who, out of season, feel restless and uprooted,” according to its Connecticut cultivator, Sondra Zeidenstein, who confesses to pruning the quantity of submissions heavily to satisfy her biases for “colloquial voice, human presence, strong emotion — and wizardry.”

Knowing how scary it is to prune drastically, we are rewarded in this anthology, as with plants we dare tend boldly. Here are choice evergreens including the late Raymond Carver, Paul Goodman and William Carlos Wiliams (that prolific physician known to scribble poetry on prescription pads), proving death is just another word for season for those who raise roots, seeds and words.

And here are popular perennials of today: Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, John Updike, all of whom have extensive collections and publication credits, including Maxine Kumin and James Merrill, poets laureate of New Hampshire and Connecticut. No less pleasing are the promises of several emerging poets ready to bloom. That many of these versifiers have been hard-core gardeners is to our benefit. That Emily Nellinga’s illustrations, like the images in the poems, are botanically and horticulturally accurate, is like finding an unexpected bouquet. Nellinga is best-known for her Maine coast scenes.

It’s the grafting of human experience and expression with sensory knowledge that satisfies most. It’s all there from joy to loss to rebirth, staked with reverence and playfulness, plotted by the cycles of a gardener’s year. This catalog of pleasures and pain growing out of an appreciation of plants and words will fertilize every pile of seed catalogs and is guaranteed to help us weather the months ahead when Now wind torments the field,/turning the white surface back/on itself, back and back on itself,/like an animal licking a wound. … A single green sprouting thing/would restore me … (from Jane Keynon’s “February: Thinking of Flowers”).

Marge Piercy’s closing piece brings the book to fruition with her teasing “Dirty Poem.” For the fun and thankfulness of it, Chicory Blue Press is at 795 East St. North, Goshen, Conn. 06756.

Pat Ranzoni is a free-lance writer who resides in Bucksport.