In her newest book, Point Reyes Station poet Ellery Akers brings all her senses to bear in her experience of the natural world. That world is a place filled with music: the sounds of birdsong, the clopping of a horse, moths tapping against glass, “a red-shafted flicker hammering for ants on the old door post.” It is a place where fog blurs the trees and covers the moon with gauze. There is the smell of wet dust, of smoke. There is the tangy taste of fresh pine needles. This is a world of poetry as prose, and prose offered up by the spoonful: each poem is just a few lines, each poem contains a universe.
The book opens this way:
One night when I was depressed, I asked for a sign. I stood on a cliff and watched two deer step onto the beach below. Their hooves clinked when they crossed the shale, and when they walked up the beach, their hoof prints filled with seawater. Each pool held a moon. I tried to understand what it meant as kelp washed back and forth and the sea breathed below me. It’s all gone now—who I longed for, what I felt. All I remember are those thirty or forty moons, shining.
How extraordinary: the clink of deer hooves on shale. The moon shimmering in seawater. Now we have an idea of what to expect. This poetry is personal. This slim, square book, mostly written in the first person, is as much a memoir as a guide into the author’s appreciation of nature. Lying “under the bright track of the zodiac,” she sees “a goat. A swan. A strong man who kneels.” Her own constellations!
In a poem about boundaries, Akers writes:
I knew exactly where I was on that acre; I knew when a drop of rain slid down a huckleberry leaf, and where it would land; I knew where each bird was nesting; I knew the songs, the calls, the scolding, the hopping from branch to branch; I knew when a warbler would blunder into the next plot and be chased away.
My family had no boundaries. My mother, when she was drinking, used to crash into my room and fall on my bed in the middle of the night.
The book consists of four short chapters. One is on nature (though the chapters are all about nature—in a recent interview, Akers confessed, “I don’t think of nature as a subject. It’s my great love.”). One chapter is an elegy for the author’s sister; another is on love, aptly titled “In the Blaze,” and if you’ve ever been madly, wildly in love, these four poems will burn you. And finally, a chapter called “The Parallel and Not Inferior World,” a miscellany of unforgettable moments.
In the elegy, she writes about the dead:
They can only watch as we thrash through our lives. To them, we must look like elk blundering into the undergrowth. My sister, who slammed doors in the years of her hot, packed life, has turned into moonlight. All she can do now is shine.
The black and white art that accompanies Akers’s prose poems is made with ink on Yupo, a non-porous, white plastic paper that allows parts of her creations to disappear simply by washing off the ink with water. Erasure becomes part of the art. She uses unconventional tools too, applying ink with a basting or bottle brush, a whisk broom, a matt of doll’s hair, a twig. The results suggest a marsh, a forest, brush, a lake, a rippled ocean, a scribbled landscape, something subterranean, something ethereal to compliment her exquisitely elegant poetry.
Akers’s poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and appeared in The New York Times Magazine, “Poetry,” and The American Poetry Review. Her art has shown in the Anchorage Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, among other museums and galleries. She will appear with Jane Hirschfield at the Point Reyes Community Presbyterian Church at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26. “A Door into the Wild” is the winner of the 2024 Blue Light Book Award.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the West Marin Review, the author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.