Quiet, harsh, full of sky.
Quite beautiful.

This is a beautiful, sparse, sharp, and cutting book about the American Western landscape, but also landscape more broadly. It's about fields, snow, horses, fences, cottonwoods, rivers, fish. There is something both mountainous and pastoral in these poems. They are almost all grounded in very concrete images of western landscapes—but then the landscapes also leap to include the interior, the strange. The poems all seem to be about looking (the snow in the field, the horse standing at the fence, fish on a hook, cottonwoods shedding their blossoms in spring, a barn) but in and among these very solid images are these little flights about being a woman, violence done to women, longing, loss, being lonely. “I pretended / the world was afraid of me because I was alone.” Or “I have my salted methodology.” 

There’s this keen longing, and the direct cut of most of the poems seems to mirror not just the landscape itself, the long fields and the snow and the quiet and the rushing streams, but also what the landscape awakes inside the speaker, and how that can in turn change the landscape in this continual cycle. So the landscape isn’t just snow and cottonwoods, but also what the snow has to say about loss, or what the lone horse makes someone feel about fear. The landscape becomes not just solid in the physical world but solid in the emotions it creates that then seep back into it. Why is a field lonely? Is it because of the expanse of snow and white or because of what it feels like looking across one at dusk? And I think in these poems Parks is saying, both—and that it is impossible to separate the two. That a field is made by both the seer and the seen, by both its grasses and its memories, by both what it is and what it seems to be. 

My favorite poem is this long sequence, "Letters from a Woman Homesteader", with words taken mostly from a book of the same name published in 1914. One of the most beautiful and incredible parts of this poem are the dates that appear about each letter, like “After winter”, “Sheep-month,” “Haying-time” and “Dove-colored afternoon”. The poems are these little snippets about weather, about the life of the writer, with these incredible spaces left between. In one: “Same woman. Lost here, get tired of loneliness.” 

I love the landscapes of these letter poems, which feel tiny and intimate, with news about frosts, birds, cooking, visits, the sheep, the snow. Among and between these, all of these surprising lines that are almost impossible to understand: “myself greatly changed” or “patches of a home.” As if there is this whole story that's not in the poem. The letters are partial erasures, with some brackets of empty space, and there is something about them that feels like a horizon, like the expression of landscape. Here are all these parts, here’s the sheep or a snowstorm that scattered the meadowlarks, here’s an apron or some wind, and then here’s me inside in, changed, lonely, here’s the patches of a home, and none of these things quite add up, like how you can’t quite understand a landscape and what it means just by looking at it. You have to think about how the internal and external, the visible and invisible pieces add up, are talking to each other. And then when you think about how this poem is Parks working in concert with this document, these letters written over a century ago—it’s so moving and so eerie, too. The way landscapes of all different kinds can shift, can stay the same.