Firmament

In the intimate and lyrical poems of Firmament, Christopher Martin is wanderer and observer wading through natural and spiritual landscapes as he considers "what it means to die yet remain bound to a living thing" and how our connection to nature is our connection to spirituality. With Martin as unflinching guide, we're shown what's temporary and what's permanent, what it means not to turn away, and how to find redemption amidst injustice. Every poem in this collection feels like a revelation.

-Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Author of Dear Outsiders and Malak

We live within place names, histories large and small, the families we create and our families of origin, but how does a person come into their own? How does one manifest their own sense of faith via the roles of father, son, citizen, poet, and earth-steward? In Christopher Martin's insightful and often stunning collection Firmament, coming into one's own involves the will and guts to say no to your inheritance, to question all that has been handed to you. Whether that be a religion, a country's history, an acceptance of hurt from those closest to you or a trust in your own instincts born from human vulnerability and earth-bound revelations. These poems live in the parallel realms of the natural world that can be counted on for peace and beauty, and the faulty human world that often fails us, but which we cannot live without. Each of us finding shelter / in all the living and the dead / given to the understory.

-Tina Schumann, Poetry Editor of Wandering Aengus Press

Christopher Martin's Firmament is a masterpiece of specificity. Place-based not only in his native state of Georgia, but beside certain creeks, rivers, and roads, on Kennesaw Mountain and its Civil War battlefield, at the Etowah American Indian mounds. His poems also include an abundance of fauna-blue herons, gulf fritillaries, salamanders, buzzards, a bison, sandhill cranes. It's a world so rich you can sense the humidity, smell the loamy earth, get the urge to hit the trail yourself. Although Martin expresses a distrust of fundamental religion, Firmament is a deeply spiritual book, full of reverence for time spent with his children and grandfather and of solace found in the natural world. This is a poet who feels deeply and seeks answers; this is a collection that satisfies the soul.

-Kathleen Brewin Lewis, Author of Magicicada