Cathleen Cohen | Review of These Few Seeds by Meghan Sterling

August 20, 2021
Edited by Stephanie Kaylor

Cathleen Cohen

Review of These Few Seeds by Meghan Sterling

These Few Seeds by Meghan Sterling Terrapin Books, 2021 What could be more essential now than to grapple with the world we inhabit and will leave to our children? Meghan Sterling’s passionate, riveting collection, These Few Seeds, (Terrapin Books, 2021) is a companion and a guide to this moment. She trains an unflinching gaze on what’s threatened in our natural world while reminding us of its beauty. The speaker of these poems explores the importance of heritage and family and focuses on love’s agency and power, particularly for her daughter. From the opening poem, “Morning Prayer”, the speaker stands amid the streams of mythical story as well as ecological dangers to pray for her daughter’s safety, “It is the beginning when there/ was you and me and her in the water that’s rising — /oceans, lakes, rivers, streams…” Her fierce devotion is made all the more poignant by her concerns as a contemporary mother. From “Daughter”:

I dreamed that the earth is on fire beneath us— that is what love is, I take you into myself as though you are the petal pink to the open hand, a plums stone sweet.

What beauty the poet offers us through her lyrical images. She brushes these throughout her collection like a master watercolor painter. Her writing is spacious and can hold intimate moments alongside a keen awareness of possible threats:

… fear and terrible hunger to save all this for you to live in, an ocean that asks for tenderness, a sky that begs for quiet.

Sterling writes sensitively about many subjects, such as an adolescent’s insight into her own foibles and growing powers and the loss and discovery of love. She deftly weaves together details of lived experience with insights regarding ancestors, whose memories may be loosely grasped, but which still reverberate, “ ghosts in the streets/that shame us into naming ourselves, outing ourselves,/to keep them from disappearing.” Many of these poems move between a personal and broader view, as in “California”, with “...the ocean eating/the side of the whole state…” and in “Codicil”, a poignant lament addressed to her daughter (and to us), “… whose earth may not be my earth,/with earth may be scorched/with flames…” Sterling’s outstanding, “Man Subdues Terrorist with Narwal Task on London Bridge”, considers the trauma of this real news event and its complex implications as through a prism. She envisions the ”Steel railing of the bridge, November air. People scattering, the chaos of extraordinary situations. ” But she can also “…imagine the feel of it in my hands,/ ivory helix, spots of decay…”

While viewing a landscape painting absent of birds: I knew the bird as it flew invisible, a blue stroke behind cloud. I felt the truth of light as it spun down from a distant sun.

These wonderful poems sing out the gifts and losses of this world with an honest, compassionate voice. They have much to teach us. Visit Meghan Sterling's Website Visit Terrapin Books's Website