“In the best pastoral tradition, *Orchard Days* reveals its deceptively simple pastoral landscape–apple orchards, barns, and mill ponds–to be a place for pondering life’s greatest complexities. In this world that is “almost Eden,” where marriage, childbirth, and filial relationships are typically romanticized, the poet explores domestic violence (“The most dangerous time for a woman is the time when her Abuser realizes she might leave”); the mortality rate of labor and delivery (“the most dangerous thing a woman can do in America is give birth” ); and paternity uncertainty. As with Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” apple boughs and green grass momentarily mask the truth that time holds us “green and dying.” The beauty that Heather Corbally Bryant locates in the landscape, over which a harvest moon “close to tangerine” shines, makes that particular truth easier to bear.”
–Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman WA
Heather Corbally Bryant is an incredible wordsmith. The poems in Orchard Days and Beyond, her tenth collection, are artfully crafted, deeply thoughtful, and keenly observant. Whether showing appreciation for the smaller things in life or delving into larger issues, her poems brim over with crisp imagery. Further, Bryant challenges readers to embrace both the positive and the negative of life with outstretched arms. For example, there is a strong sense of radical self-acceptance in the following lines from the poem Last Summer:
“As I slip into the ordinary, I am struck by the fact I will only Be here a short while—”
These lines, as well as many others exemplify how Heather Corbally Bryant needs only a few words to achieve the maximum effect. The poems in Orchard Days and Beyond are stunning and heartfelt. The book is a must-read.
–Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram, Host, Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio, www.blogtalkradio.com/ql_p
Heather Bryant‘s “Orchard Days” conjures the natural world and, as suddenly as real nature itself, the sense of foreboding overtakes you, and the human reality of her story turns savage and cold, but at times also comical, absurd.
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The effortless yet measured breath of Bryant’s lyric voice belies a fractured universe of intimate violence. You read this collection as you do a Gothic novel of suspense; the speaker leaves myriad small clues to an abusive and cloistered marital life for the reader to find. Does the speaker need to be rescued? No, because she has already escaped, through the redemptive power of her own perception, and the wonder of motherhood, recollected in a globetrotting travelogue rendered in the watercolor of Bryant’s lines.
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But a menacing, distorted shadow looms over this pastel canvas, this Gothic novel in verse, even if the monster has already been vanquished. The twilight portrait of his darkened will oppressing hers—and here the biblical Eve is often invoked—blurs the glimmer of redemption promised by the “humbling” beauty of children and prelapsarian Eden. Through the blur of tears, a gifted poet has found her voice.
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Bryant’s voice is at times Plath-like, other times reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Marie Ponsot, even modernist masters Eliot, Frost and Williams. For, the plenitude of modern American poetry fills the sails of her verse. as the seashell echoes the sound of the sea, her speaker reclaims herself by listening to the quiet rhythms of her experience, cloistered and cosmopolitan as it is. Bryant’s “Orchard Days” is a crepuscular canvas of pastoral trauma, humble motherhood, self-recovery, and ultimately self-liberation.
–Octavio R. González, author of The Book of Ours (2009) and Misfit Modernism (2020), Associate Professor, English & Creative Writing, Wellesley College
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