Writing the Significant Soil

by David Anthony Sam

Overview

Writing the Significant Soil by David Anthony Sam explores the long relationship of human life with nature without sentimentality or the cold distance of the clinical eye. Sam's poems reveal his own close connection with the Appalachian Mountains and the red clay of the MidAtlantic and Virginia as he searches for meaning in the act of living on and with the land by using the poetic ink he makes from the soil. The history of Virginia, bled into the earth by war and human struggle to live, interplays with the war we have made against nature and the land. The collection admits the danger we humans impose on the natural world while revealing a simple faith that that natural world will abide even as we as individuals give our identity back into the land we sprang from. The soil is significant in and of itself as life-giving place and because of our history of living on it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956368192
Publisher:	Wayfarer Books
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

Editorial Reviews

"David Anthony Sam sings the psalms of our landscapes and skies, 'declaration of rising sunsets, ' 'mis-placed stars, ' and 'a wave of feathers / breaking.' He weaves together lamentation and faith: 'Now that I am peaceful to the bees, / they are lost to lice and viruses/ I do become the hope of honey.' Loss and acceptance, 'Fire has always been.' His stunning articulations of the detrimental intersections between the natural world and humanity leaves me wounds split open, but with the salve of this life's persistent beauty, 'It is a new season.' "

-Angie Dribben, author of Everygirl

"What is a world but the many ways of our reckoning of it, with it? Sometimes we meet it with muscle, other times with uncertainty or wavering despair. Swinging between changes of weather, we sift through limestone, red clay, and black bread. The snail keeps on, surely; even silences are a honey thickening in wells. 'Make ink from what is burned, ' says David Anthony Sam in Writing the Significant Soil; give words to a life of meaningful cultivation."

-Luisa A. Igloria, 20^th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia; author of Maps for Migrants

"During a time when the natural world is increasingly under assault, David Anthony Sam's poems are especially relevant. He examines nature with the eye of a scientist and the reverential awe of a mystic. Whether he writes about sap from a maple during sugaring time, granite boulders in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Julius Caesar's last breath, or 'atoms [that] ring / with the surprise of one true bird' in his body, he startles us with refreshing insights and identifications. He would say with Whitman: 'And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.' Writing the Significant Soil demonstrates the sort of empathy that we all need to keep the Earth and ourselves whole and healthy.

-Henry Hart, 19^th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia; author of The Ghost Ship

From the Publisher