first snow by Lynda McKinney Lambert

My grandmother knew the name of every bird by note and call who ever sang to the sun in the fields by her Wisconsin country home, and she knew the names of the trees by bark and needle and leaf in the woods.  In these days of urban desolation and digital isolation, it is harder and harder to keep hold of the once-common natural knowledge.  Here in Lynda Lambert’s poetry the vitality of the seasons are still felt, seen and heard.   Lambert notices the colors and sounds that surround us, those sights and odes that barely register through our buds and pads and windshields, and she names them for us and she remembers them for us.  In these poems, Lambert calls her readers to celebrate the blue spruce in the morning fog, to “stand in darkness / urging Blood Moon-arise” and to be alive in the old ways.  “It feels like we have been here,” she says of one icy morning, “for a thousand years.”  In these pages, we have.

–Russell Streur, editor Plum Tree Tavern, author Fault Zones.