Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower: Poems

"A rich catalog of the Anthropocene, including history, research, and initiative."--Ellen Bass, author of In Indigo

Essential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other.

In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert's spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation.

The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds "light having an edge over darkness." Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming's poems pay homage to "every organism's joy to thrive," every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, editor of the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems in Celebration of Animals & The People Who Love Them. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, Stanford's Stegner Fellowship and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has been widely published, including in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, NB, Canada.