James Engelhardt is a self-proclaimed eco-poet. In his manifesto, he describes eco-poetry as an attempt to connect readers to the natural world and their own bodies to raise environmental consciousness. Bone Willows, Engelhardt’s debut poetry collection, charts the five years he spent living with his family in rural Alaska, a part of the world in serious need of protection. Under the Trump administration “Alaska is open for business” to oil and gas companies, giving Engelhardt’s poems a sense of urgency and foreboding. One might hope a copy of this engaging collection lands itself onto Potus’ desk, but I very much doubt that he reads poetry.

I had the surreal and quite pleasant experience of reading these poems during a heatwave—itself a consequence of environmental changes. They conjured a world I had not encountered since my childhood fixation with Jack London’s huskies and wild Gold Rush-era dogs. This landscape with its beautiful words—”boreal,” “taiga,” “Yukon,” “audabe,” “shims” as a verb, “ptarmigan”—is prime material for poetry but the poet wisely steers away from cliché, intertwining his observations of natural phenomena with neighbourly dinner parties, his daughter watching dogs defecate on rubbish heaps, and his own marital tensions.

His relationship with his daughter underpins the collection. In “What You Know About This Place” he writes,

She’ll hate him for something

and love him for something else.

It is perhaps his love for his daughter which precipitates the poems’ poignant concern with the passing of time which provides some of the collection’s most striking lines. In “Faster, Spin the Wheel Faster,” “Ice and snow shock to flowers in forty-eight hours”. In “The familiar conditions change brings,” “change riots through the yard”. And in “A and Not-A” the poet helplessly observes “years speeding through the house”. This theme is most painfully captured in “Only Connect” in which the poet speaks of death in the same breath as describing the vital aliveness of his young daughter:

And death rises like another step along a ridge,

a gift from a child.

Engelhardt is a poet unafraid of his own vulnerabilities which easily endears him to the reader. Indeed, some of the most memorable poems chart the tensions in his marriage whilst living in an environment his wife despises. In “Aufeis,” glacial sheets become a metaphor for slowly melting relationships and in “Spring Brings Only Early Dawn” tensions almost boil to violence:

a man

sliding his anger at his wife, a woman

pushing a knife through despair

Happily all is not lost, as recorded in the moving “Into Language”:

They search the rift we know

hasn’t healed and splits each room . . .

. . . The girl claps her hands, the moon is almost up,

a star darts, our eyes fill, we spread our arms wide.

Although the collection is rooted in domesticity, the poet is not immune to the magic of the boreal landscape. The titles of many of the poems reference Norse mythology—”Freya and Odr”—and Pagan traditions—”Brigit and Ostara.” The final poem of the collection presents a raven as the local shama and pagan festivals hold great importance in this remote community, as recorded in “Tundra Carol” and “Boreal Halloween”:

Cold webs and the quarter-year, Celts

and Saxons and Norse consult the dead

before the long night relaxes into starlight chips.

The collection is full of surprises, keeping the reader engaged until the final pages. One such poem is “River’s Head,” an elegy for birth and motherhood which takes the poet himself by surprise:

I haven’t meant to collect these stories —

the contraction, dilations, the deep softening.

Some of the poems feel deliberately unfinished, as if Engelhardt is acknowledging the vastness and unknowability of the landscape in which he finds himself. The rawness of the environment is woven through the book with the repetition of the words “bone” and “bony”. This is life pared back to its essence, for better or worse. I sincerely hope the poet’s marriage thawed when he eventually moved back down south, but his family’s experience has left us with a highly recommendable, memorable collection full of joy and darkness.

Buy Bone Willows (Boreal Books, 2018) here.









Author Details Emma Gleeson Contributor Emma Gleeson lives in Dublin. Her writing adventures include poems, cultural reviews, and essays. She has worked in the theatre industry as a costume designer and events coordinator, and lectures on sustainability. She has a BA in Drama & Theatre and an MA in Fashion History.