The Seeds

Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems by Parks (O’Nights). The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures (among them, Persephone, Demeter, and Ann Bradstreet) alongside musings on matters closer to home, including the stranger who cuts the stray branch of bougainvillea poking out from the slats of Parks’s fence (a woman who takes something beautiful and cuts “it all down like a man/ in a poem about reaping written by a man”). Elsewhere, the poet carefully questions the symbols used to describe the metamorphosis of a woman who becomes a mother: “Which image of motherhood would she choose?/ Motherhood as water or/ bed, motherhood as the event/ or the shape it left?” A series of short and stunning rhyming poems not only have the cadence of nursery or hopscotch songs, but are grounded in the distracted and messy domestic space that motherhood inhabits: “Laurel, anthill, train horn blare,/ pecan shell shards on the stair.” “The Bat” opens with echoes of Goodnight Moon: “Goodbye oaks, dogwoods, ashes and elms./ Goodbye, caves. Goodbye, mines and the coal/ that lit up the night. Goodbye, night that the bats fly by.” As it progresses, the poem shifts toward calamity, with the bats left “indexing the distance between hawthorn and extinction.” Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth. (Oct.)