Growth Rings
GROWTH RINGS
by GALA MALHERBE
Today’s
literary world—like today’s world generally—desperately needs more of the
poetic gratitude and sincerity found in Gala Malherbe’s Growth Rings. Like Keats, she trusts the holiness of her heart’s
affections, trusts what she calls her “deepest compass” to guide her to
memories and daily attentions. “Time will take it all,” she reminds herself.
The north-woods childhood and enchanted relatives. The moments that make a
marriage and parenting and adult daughterhood and caretaking the ailing. The
dust of bumpy backroads. The berries and flowers and menagerie of critters. The
summer swimming days and snow. And yes, even the trees. But she gives it all to
us with great skill and in glorious details that feel, in each instant, eternal
anyway, thereby teaching us to do the same with our own ordinary, glorious
lives. What a gift.
Jonathan Johnson, author of In the Land We Imagined Ourselves
In
59 lyrical poems, Gala Malherbe weaves an unforgettable memoir of her life from
age 3 to 50 in and around her hometown of Munising, along Lake Superior, in
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The book is structured metaphorically according to
the growth of trees, each stage or aspect elucidated briefly in the vocabulary
of environmental science and enhanced in brief epigrams such as that of Albert
Einstein: “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.”
Thus, poems spring from acute observation of both nature and inner topographies
of the poet herself and of those she loves. Aural pleasure of her language,
loving foundation of family and forest and lake, first loss, contribute to the
pleasure and depth of this book. Poems move down the page flawlessly, often
heightened through the use of repetition and refrain, as in “What the Doctor
Did Not Know” and “The Poem Inside Me.” In this book, Gala Malherbe bewitches,
leaving us changed.
U.P.
Poet Laureate Beverly Matherne,
author of Love Potions, Teas, Incantations