An Orchid’s Guide to Life by Kathryn Jones

The poems in An Orchid’s Guide to Life offer us the sensuous colors, scents, and textures of the natural landscape in which Kathryn Jones spent her childhood and which she now carries within her as memory. The poet wrestles with the great grief of being wholly orphaned by loss, as she pays tribute to her mother and father, her childhood home, and the girl she once was. Like Amichai, she finds wild peace in nature, among purpling mistflowers and Monarchs, and she contemplates the many-chambered heart of the hard-shelled nautilus—as if to ask how we survive in our deeply bifurcated world. Perhaps the flower spikes of the Phalaenopsis orchid appearing in the title poem—with their beckoning beauty and hard-edged shield—suggest the paradox all life must navigate.

–Robin Davidson, 2015–2017 Houston Poet Laureate & author of Mrs. Schmetterling

A plant can be our teacher as revealed in Kathryn Jones’s lush and deeply personal collection. Guided by her father’s passion—orchids whose beauty springs from gangly roots and tough resilience—the poet confronts grief and loss, recognizing her own solace within the natural world. She asks the orchids after his death: “How will I care for you?” With a realist’s eye and a romantic’s heart Jones eloquently answers as memory becomes a legacy of caring and keeping—like the bitter-sweet loquat’s “sunshine on the tongue.”

–Shelley Armitage, A Habit of Landscape

This deeply moving collection of poems serves not only as a daughter’s poignant paean to her father, but also as a beautifully rendered series of life lessons about family, about growing old, and about the consolations of nature. As she tells us about orchids, even when held captive in a pot, their roots grow out of their confines in order to dangle free in the air. For Kathryn Jones, the poet is the keeper of memory –the observer and recorder of everyday life in a wild, yet intimate universe that reveals itself, even in the most mundane of situations, in a dazzling order of patterns, colors, swirls, and spirals — in the improbable exotic beauty of an orchid blooming in the unlikeliest of places.

–Carol Flake Chapman, a former journalist, is the author of three books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Sixty Four: Best Poets of 2019.