Poetry has been a balm for me in recent months so I was delighted to receive from a friend (thanks Kate Mildenhall) How To Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver, published by Faber and Faber Bloomsbury in 2021. I didn’t even know this talented author wrote poetry! But wow, this slim volume really packs a punch.
Direct, refreshing, original, evocative and emotional, this collection is very much like her prose, with a Helen Garneresque attention to detail, critical observation and perceptive insight. Exploring nature, intimacy, personal thought, social critique and history, Kingsolver presents a series of poems that range from short, sharp and crisp, to long and exploratory. The first section is the How To Fly collection, including How to Have A Child (a favourite), How to Survive This, How to Be Hopeful, How to Drink Water When There is Wine, How to Get a Divorce, and How to Do Absolutely Nothing (to name a few). The second section, Pellegrinaggio, contains poems about Italy, and the other sections (some self-explanatory) are This is How They Come Back to Us (death, grief and loss), Walking Each Other Home, Dancing with the Devil, Where it Begins (only one long prose poem) and The Nature of Objects (13 poems exploring fungi, birds, weather, light, flowers, rivers, elephants, Africa, Australia, mussels, maples, minnows, ants, the Great Barrier Reef and the Forests of Antarctica.)
Throughout the collection, Kingsolver encourages us to engage with nature and the world around us, to be open to others, to consider our own mortality and to ponder the infinite beauty and impossibility of the universe.
I found solace in these poems, in this exquisite writing, not only because I had just lost someone I loved, but because this writer has the ability to expand the most intimate details into the broadbrush painting of wider reality.