Tender Gravity

This poetry collection follows Marybeth Holleman as she searches for a connection with the more-than-human world, from her childhood in North Carolina to her adult life in Alaska. Its poems linger over deep time, remote land and coastal waters, asking what can be discovered when a person turns full attention outward, past the boundaries of the self. Loss runs through the book: the loss of cherished places, of wild creatures, and of her younger brother.

The collection moves through seeking, falling and finding. In one poem, Holleman speaks to her mother, insisting that she does not love a bear more than her brother. She says instead that she cannot tell apart the faint variations in a heartbeat. Comfort comes from the wild, from a return to the vitality rising through the natural world and into the single world that exists.

Holleman's close, observant style calls to mind Mary Oliver, Linda Hogan and Walt Whitman. The poems of grief and celebration swell and recede, reaching out to the familiar moon and to the orphaned stars of distant galaxies, then drawing in close to a small brown seabird and a tiny bog plant seen from the ground.