Rogue Wave at Glass Beach

Maureen Eppstein

WINTER GREENS

Fresh compost a fragrant crumble in my hand,
damp with the first of the season’s rain.
More rain on its way, and winter dark
that echoes an inner bleakness.

This is the act of reconciliation:
muscle rhythm of shovel and wheelbarrow,
load upon load to fill the planting box.

This is the gesture of hope:
to remember the taste of fresh-cut salad greens
and act on it.

The brown string, soft with age,
bobbles in my hand as it unwinds
from dirt-caked sticks to mark the row.
Scritch of trowel through earth
to form the furrow.
Almost inaudible rustle of seed from packet.
Weightless in my hand and hard,
they lose themselves in the receiving earth.

This is the sound of faith:
a rake tamping down soil over new plantings—
snap peas, bok choi, lettuces—
tines on the diagonal, first one direction
then crisscrossed down the line.

isbn 1-59661-110-3
90 pages/$15

Comments on Rogue Wave at Glass Beach:

With a simple elegance yet passionate attention to nature, to the legacies of the land and people around her, Eppstein renders both the ant and the redwood unforgettable, and reminds us to stay awake, to praise each living, breathing being.
—Dorianne Laux
author of Facts About the Moon,
Smoke, and What We Carry

In “Manaia,” Maureen Eppstein writes of a stranger who gives her “a carved/ and polished disk of bone…tail coiled like a fern frond unfolding…or a lizard, keeper of life and death.” Rogue Wave at Glass Beach is much like this amulet, the poet’s gift to us. As Maureen Eppstein says, “Nothing between us but this shared glimpse.” What could be a better definition of poetry?
—Ellen Bass
author of The Human Line and Mules of Love

Through stunning images and sure music, these moving and admirably crafted poems impress themselves upon us like the lineaments of place, reminding us that language is the way we learn to belong.
—Joshua McKinney
author of The Novice Mourner and Saunter

Maureen Eppstein tends a garden between the forest and the sea in Mendocino, California.

Comments on Eppstein’s previous March Street book, Quickening:

With a naturalist’s eye for the precise and sensuous image and a writer’s care for the precise and sensuous word, Maureen Eppstein plants our human griefs into this book, roots them, and invites them to quicken into new life.
—Jane Hirshfield, author of Nine Gates; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After

These eloquent poems appear at first to record detail, the ordinary, the everyday. They celebrate a swallow’s nest, sand grains, even the growth of weeds. But there is a twist: these are also dark pastorals that—in the poet’s words—review and regret “the damaged earth.” Again and again, these poems return to defenseless nature, to creatures looted and evicted, and to human lives hurt and interrupted. This shadowing of the relation between the poet and every kind of nature is the real theme of these fine poems. It deepens and sharpens their music.
—Eavan Boland, author of An Origin Like Water, The Lost Land, and Domestic Violence