ENTWINE by Mary Newell

ENTWINE is a rich entanglement of witness and record in the more-than-human woods-edge environs. Migrating from poem to photograph and to poem again, Newell invokes the astonishing
alliances between the natural world and the unexceptional human to imagine a confluence of interspecies wonder in the Chthulucene. “[H]old a seed in a calm hand,” Newell writes, “Feel the faint pulsation.” Newell’s poems take the position of the hidden birdwatcher in quiet observation of the hummingbird and hawk. And yet, this book also reminds us that the stakes of ecological decline must lie at the core of the ecopoem. As Newell asks, “What can we hope to retrieve?”

—Orchid Tierney, author of this abattoir is a college


Entwined: hummingbirds and salvia with evolution; tree branches with sky; frogs with what they eye; chlorophyll with hemoglobin; plants with their animacies and plans; stunning photographs with time-lapse ekphrastic poems; a pollinator-poet with her garden: "tendrils entwined in uplift" — these are poems of an enriched inhabitation and emotive entanglement "at the purple dot on the Hudson Highlands map." Intimate with knowledge, Mary Newell thinks into and along with ecological relationality as a flowering plant thinks like a bee. Immersing us in a world of manifold care and vivacity, ENTWINE shows how looking closer and feeling close with other species requires a language of precision and a generous embrace.

— Linda Russo, author of the verdant (Middle Creek Publishing)



Mary Newell’s ecopoetry is a sensate journey of the deep web that extends from her Hudson Highlands garden, her observation posts, her camera’s lens into the more-than-human world. She guides us to observe hummingbirds, birch trees, lichen and brooks, and draws attention to new patterns, new co-evolutions, how we influence one another. She is a teacher of connection and entwinement, inviting us to see the invisible lines that draw our spaces close — the ley lines of environmental embrace.

— Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma and Diver Beneath the Street


Mary Newell, in her wondrous new work ENTWINE, does indeed gather, in a mood of 'adoptive co-evolution', the symbols of nature, the murmurings of the heart, and the aspirations of the spirit. The language lifts, a la Gerard Manley Hopkins, the gaze to the sky, leaving the reader to lightly walk the earth, in joy.

— David Appelbaum, author of Collector of Lapsed Times (Eyewear Publishing).





Foreword


ENTWINE is a wonderfully fresh celebration of entanglement, a joyous, wise response to the dynamics of the more-than-human world in its interactions with itself and with humans. Starting out from minutely observed specifics of one location, Mary Newell’s poetry swings upwards, outwards, sideways in whorls of interconnectivity. Like the ruby-throated hummingbird in the opening poems of the book, her language darts, lingers, traces and re-traces patterns reaching over tiny and immense distances. It is rooted in the Hudson Highlands, as is the sweet-birch she describes:

About lifepulse junctions enacted in form
        a tree niched near aquifer
     enfolding
   a boulder
  under shuttling sunlight
 in leaf-crafted
atmosphere
on a
looping planet  


At the same time, human hopefulness, aspiration for connection with the more-than-human world, is a driving force:

In the pith of intersecting wakes
say life is complex, perplexing -
has beauty, has pattern, has meaning
embedded in that tangle
or in its witnessing.

But who is watching whom? “Is it mere accident you seem to look my way?” the poet asks the red-tailed hawk in her yard, in the clear-eyed knowledge that it may be (this book is nothing if not self-aware). What matters, ENTWINE attests, is acknowledging the search for “ever-elusive / home-ground,” the necessary possibilities of shared spaces; in so doing constructing an ecopoetics that is exquisitely finely tuned, sparklingly alert to the here and now.

—Anna Reckin, author of Line to Curve (Shearsman)





Mary Newell authored the poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER and Re-SURGE, poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and occasional essays. She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. Newell teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and intermittent online classes. She also attends to people with musculoskeletal and neurological challenges, as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. Newell lives in the Hudson Highlands of New York, where she is an avid gardener of pollinator-friendly plants. Recording of a 2024 interview on ecopoetics with the Brooklyn Rail, conducted by Cole Swensen, is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIp-pbuSjM. Writing website: https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn



Book Information:

· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-492-5

$18