Has there ever been a lovelier word for medicine-indeed, a lovelier medicine-than rosehip? That's what I thought as I read and was riveted by Tyler Detloff's Belly-up Rosehip, a book that loves thorns as much as bloom and sings of stink as beautifully as sweetgrass.
When he writes of licking a fishing lure's hook, or asking the pine needles to have mercy on my tongue, Detloff describes caring for a place so much that you want your mouth where its mouths are, your tongue against its sharpest leaves.
No wonder the wilderness in these poems is delirious.
Sensual and serious and sometimes necessarily sad, this book charts an intimacy with a Northern Michigan landscape peopled by namegos (lake trout), migizi (bald eagle), and whips of red willow buds as well as human mothers, fathers, and lovers.
This is the place I was telling you, the poet says, inviting us to listen to what the place tells him as he becomes the man the place makes him.
Cecily Parks Assistant Professor Texas State University.
Swimming With Elephants Publications Belly up rosehip: : a tongue blue with mud songs, paperback/claire moore
