Natalie Rice, Scorch

 

ARROW-LEAVED BALSAM ROOT
FLOWER

splits the hillside.
Your arms are crossed, “maybe I’m not
your flower,” you say. Your mouth closes,
mine opens. But John Thompson
leaps between his woman’s arms and blood,
and the moon, the moon, the moon. Was I
the one who put those yellow flowers on
our sill? I walk the yellow-green
pond. A heron slips a perfect leg
into the water, moves like a dream I had
and forgot, of someone turning towards me,
arms wide open.

I’m very pleased to engage with the carved hush of Kelowna, British Columbia poet Natalie Rice’s full-length debut, Scorch (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), a book I’d been looking forward to for some time. She had a chapbook with Gaspereau in 2020 [see my review of such here] and I was immediately struck by the clarity of her lyrics, offering a sequence of sketches that are simultaneously easygoing and lyrically taut. “[…] everything is the shape / of what you love.” she writes, to close the poem “APPLES.” Across an assemblage of honed lyrics, Rice offers a way of seeing between and among the trees, able to articulate ecological space and time and our place within and surrounding it, articulating just how intimately connected and interconnected we truly are. As the sequence “LOST LAKE” begins: “A jagged breath. Sometimes stars / peel off the pond.