Brown Restless Green by Jannett Highfill

These are sad, spare, and haunting poems, with the surprise of happiness in a poem called “Homesick.” The title Brown Restless Green attuned me to those colors and a state of restlessness that drifts through like maple-seed helicopters in the wind. There is a “green scarecrow” who becomes the shadow of a man who has died, the “season’s browns” in eagle and grass, and a restless yearning that persists side by side with an Emily Dickinsonesque (or pandemic induced) peace: “Now / the circumference of my life is this room, the extent // of my venturing is this chair.” This is a perfect chapbook to read peacefully in a chair in a room.

–Kathleen Kirk, Poetry Editor, Escape Into Life

In this stunning new collection by Jannett Highfill, the poems travel as far as Grasmere Church, Casablanca, and Corfu, but the majority of works are set in the plains and prairies of the American Midwest “where roads run parallel / ruts in grassland and gypsum.” Here, readers encounter sandburs and stickers, a chance oak leaf, and eagles “the color of grass.” In a poem entitled “Resources,” the narrator sits and watches “what is enacted as if / it were a ceremony”—an apt line since each of the poems in “Brown Restless Green” is a ceremony of sorts. Highfill uses the careful hand of the poet-minister to illuminate the ritual in events both mundane and extraordinary—a finger tracing a single word in an ashtray, an ordinary evening commute, a winter day spent walking the “fences of a field growing nothing but taxes.” Throughout this collection, the poems circle effortlessly between themes of memory, loss, and thanksgiving, ultimately revealing the day-to-day effort involved in the human experience … “as long as the light lasts.”

—Elizabeth Klise, Award-winning Poet