How To Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Review
Barbara Kingsolver’s How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) (2020) is her first collection of poetry. Kingsolver is, of course, beloved for her fiction, respected for her nonfiction, and now we might add, applauded for her verse. This lyrical and moving collection is divided into seven sections that deal with love, nature, death, grief, maternity, childhood, pilgrimage, artistic creation, and this moment in human and natural history: How to Fly, Pellegrinaggio, This Is How They Come Back to Us, Walking Each Other Home, Dancing with the Devil, Where It Begins, and The Nature of Objects. These poems incite tears, sighs, and smiles in turn. Kingsolver magically weaves words like a skein of yarn into a cozy throw blanket under which we might cuddle through the year’s darker days. It is a collection I encourage any lover of poetry, particularly poetry by women, to reach for; it is a collection that will sit beside Mary Oliver’s Devotions on my shelf, its pages gradually more and more worn.
Kingsolver’s poetry reflects an aging life, a poet who has buried kin, sat at death beds, loved and lost love to death and divorce. In other words, How to Fly touches on life’s mature themes. As a woman settling deeper and deeper into middle age, I reveled in these themes; identified with them. Kingsolver creates metaphors from knitting (“Where It Begins”) and childhood memory to apply to moments in life as we survive difficult times and reflect back on what has come before. I imagine myself twenty-five years ago failing to grasp the full magic of some of Kingsolver’s project in How to Fly, but I suppose that is part of the thrill of writing; it is not only the words left on the page, but the life through which the reader receives those words, interprets them, knows their truth or is confounded by their seeming dissonance. In the end, there is something for every age among the pages of this poetry collection, but it might particularly speak to those of us who came of age (or began to, as is my own case) last century.
While young readers might not relate to the aging themes in How to Fly Kingsolver’s nature poetry is universal. It is also brilliant. Regardless of political inclination, I believe we can all agree we live at a troubling moment; storms rage, days grow hotter, wildfire smoke becomes as seasonally expected as autumn colors. Some look to the mass extinctions, the warming planet, the human-fueled destruction with blank and crippling despair; others find beautiful ways to describe and discuss it. Kingsolver is the later. She wields metaphor as any good poet would to detail connection, pattern, paradox. She touches on plant, ocean, bird, and virus. Common to all her nature poetry, Kingsolver places the reader/poet/human in its midst. We exist within, and attempt to understand all that we are emersed in, while we are also somehow divided from it by nature of our thinking selves. These are themes too big for anything beyond poetry, and Kingsolver’s How to Fly consistently rises to the challenge.
Suffice it to say, poetry lovers should read Kingsolver’s How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). As even the title (borrowed from a stirring poem in the collection’s first section and included below), life is paradox and this poet finds playful, witty ways to explore such circumstance. Kingsolver’s poetry is refreshing and beautiful, devastating and honest. She paints glorious pictures for her reader through sparse words with a magic that belongs only to the realm of poetry; her wizardry may soothe, connect, and inspire any of us to accept life, embrace the beauty of which we are a part. In fact, throughout this collection, she implores her reader to “behold,” “remember,” “walk,” and “think”: her poetry abounds in imperative as well as description. Thus, I leave you with a similar commanding tone: Go. Read. Enjoy.
Bibliography:
Kingsolver, Barbara. How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). Harper: 2020.
Titular Poem:
How To Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
Behold your body as water
and mineral worth, the selfsame
water that soon (from a tree’s
way of thinking soon) will be
lifted through the elevator hearts
of a forest, returned to the sun
in a leaf-eyed gaze. And the rest!
All worldless leavings, the perfect
bonewhite ash of you: light
as snowflakes, falling on updrafts
toward the unbodied breath of a bird.
Behold your elements reassembled
as pieces of sky, ascending
without regret, for you’ve been lucky
enough. Fallen for the last time into
a slump, the wrong crowd, love.
You’ve made the best deal.
You summited the mountain
or you didn’t. Anything left undone
you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles
into the hands of a child
who will be none the wiser.
Imagine your joy on rising.
Repeat as necessary.
(printed on page 7).
