The formally and linguistically innovative poems in GHOST HEART engage science and cultural history to explore the complex nature of the vanishing American prairie. Weaving lyrical meditations on her life as a young widow with expansive evocations of the environment, Mary Pinard reveals intimate depths and magnitudes of loss--at once personal and ecological--while giving readers a vision of how we might reinvent ourselves and restore the planet.
"The poems in GHOST HEART probe history, science, and the poet's loss in midlife of her beloved husband. Embedded in the word 'remnant, ' which makes its presence felt throughout the collection, is the idea of what remains--of the once-vast geographic and biological entity we call the prairie; of its first peoples, subjected to displacement and genocide; and of the poet's life as she comes to terms with widowhood. With consummate artistry, Pinard stitches together facts and fabrics, memory and the present, mind and heart. Asking readers to attend with their full selves, these poems offer in return a deep wisdom and an abiding beauty."--Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
"'My heart might be a prairie, ' Mary Pinard writes, '...made / to stand despite the unbroken // wind, vanishings, / loneliness.' Prairies and loneliness are the warp and weft of GHOST HEART, plainspoken poems of uncommon inventiveness and beauty. A widow searches for solace in her husband's native prairielands. She studies their remnants, their histories, damage and losses, a cowbird eggshell, the rim of Flint Hills. She mends and remakes her husband's effects. Pinard's poems are shaped by grief, a wide variety of poetic forms, an affirming curiosity, and intellect. This shaping and containing and returning to the source of love and sorrow delicately--powerfully--enacts the human will to go on. These poems are more than a means of deliverance. They're art."--Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume
"In these courageous, searching poems, Mary Pinard explores what she calls an 'echo-system'--or, perhaps, several such systems, woven together. Leaning into grief and loss--personal, the grief of a widow, and planetary, the lament for the endangered prairie biome--she writes of 'perspective and its loss, // inevitable erasures.' Formally expansive (including concentrated elegies, sprawling Georgics, sonnets, tritinas, a form of truncated sestina, and haiku), these poems piece together 'remnants' in new vitalities."--Elizabeth Dodd, editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope
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