The Garden of Fragile Beings by Carolyn Welch

The poems in The Garden of Fragile Beings, Carolyn Welch’s deep and moving examination of the richness of life, offer buoyant odes and sobering elegies, many about a career spent in the noblest occupation, the nursing of gravely ill children. Poems such as “Nurses in Spring” and “Two-Year Olds in ICU” take us directly into that world of hope and vulnerability. Welch’s poems bring their readers to some elemental questions about art. Why do we make it? What is it good for? What lack does it fill? I am reminded of William Carlos Williams, himself a physician, and his famous lines about poetry from his volume, Paterson: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems, / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Welch’s poems remind us that we may find a balm in poetry, and in nature, as in “Mercy,” where trillium abides “Unsanctioned and / perhaps holy among the brambles.” Such small, and often unexpected, pleasures are necessary when confronted with the fragile beings that live within these poems. Carolyn Welch’s The Garden of Fragile Beings reminds us that beauty takes on a special radiance when its source may not last, and these poems share their unforgettable abundance of grace and light.

–Jesse Graves is the author of two books of poetry:  Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Basin Ghosts.