Ancient Light: Poems

Kimberly Blaeser’s sixth collection, Ancient Light, begins with images of colonization and the political, spiritual and physical possession of indigenous bodies. “Poem on Disappearance” asks the reader to draw the New World as it emerged from 1491, tracing wondrous “trade routes, languages, seasonal migrations.” But she warns, “…don’t become attached … / move your pencil point quickly now as if pursued— / a cavalry of possession that erases / homelands.” We all know where this is going, but the poet invites us to join in the creative act of redrawing and rewriting the whitewashed history of America.

Blaeser, an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota, is a past Wisconsin poet laureate and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She left her university post early, she explained in a recent interview, “in protest because the Indigenous faculty discovered they had been kept unaware of unrepatriated ancestral remains housed in boxes in a campus classroom building.”

“The ancestors live in white—cardboard boxes,” Blaeser writes in “Taxonomy,” emphasizing the racial tones of power and the specimenized dehumanization of such interments. Animals often provide emotional rescue in Blaeser’s work—deer, otters, cranes, crows, herons, and trout—to remind us of our kinship with the natural world and to assist in our transcendence above human limitations. In this poem, a cormorant, a hearty water bird well adapted to changing environments and able to swallow astonishingly large prey, reminds us that “We swallow whole the impossible. No one / feeds prettily. Avert your eyes, survive.” The poet implies that many of us ignore or tolerate injustices and indignities to get on with our lives or simply survive, and yet she persists in the hope that a proper burial will happen—“Ancestors wait on shelves in numbered boxes.” These spirits in limbo join the cormorant:

They dive, propel themselves with webbed feet.
Shaggy cormorant wings spread wide to dry.
Perhaps we are not praying when we lift our hands.

There’s anger, resentment, and demands for justice in many of these poems, but also a reverence for the renewing powers nature, human relationships, ceremony and language—both English and the poet’s native Ojibwe, which speaks throughout the book. Scripted almost as a spoken word memoir, “The Where in My Belly,” maps the poet’s origins,

A small island—minis, I emerged
Among Minnesota’s northern lakes,
The where of manoomin—wild rice in my belly.

She is “from boats and canoes and kayaks / from tribal ghosts who rise at dawn / dance like wisps of fog on water.” Water is a key element in the poet’s world:

I am from nibi and ogichidaakweg,
women warriors and water protectors…

Using the online Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, I translated and read aloud manoomin, wild rice and nibi, river, and many other words, unfurling the bilingual richness of this distinct and powerful collection.

Drawing on the rhythmic patterns of ritual, Ancient Light bathes us in eleven imagistic poems under the refrain, “The Way We Love Something Small.” These meditations in the Anishinaabe dream song tradition elevate the delicate and ephemeral—a whispered word, hummed tune, spring crocus, a newborn mouse—heightening our ability to acknowledge and preserve their significance. At the book’s center, we find the fifth permutation of “The Way We Love Something Small”:

In the cold blur hour of winter
the world wound tight and blue,
while we fold and triangle white paper.
Our kindergarten scissors an act of god—
we open close and fractal, replicating.

Even then our tenderness too big
.…………………………………….for accuracy.

The poem recalls the popular childhood craft of cutting out paper snowflakes, playfully suggesting the activity’s mathematical and mystical significance. The children’s earnest love and attention, which was once ours, generates outsized representations of nature’s tiny ice crystals.

There are many remarkable poems of recollected youth in Ancient Light, including “Found Recipe,” a richly detailed, touching and humorous account of the speaker preparing snapping turtle soup with her elderly grandmother. In the plain-spoken sonnet, “The Knife My Father Gave Me at Eight,” a confident young girl tells us that a cherished pocketknife

whispered to me the things he left unsaid.
Small, sharp, and pearl-handled pretty—
it does the work of any man’s blade.

Reminiscences also contain cruelties, whether it’s an elder’s traumatic memory of an Indian boarding school, racist insults brandished in team mascots, domestic violence, or the ongoing horror of missing and murdered Native American women: “you’ve seen them postered and amber-alerted— / missing, missing, evening newsed, and gone.”

Murder, racism, domestic abuse, divisive politics, climate change and environmental degradation motivate Blaeser’s poignant protests, and yet she strives for peace, celebrating activists like Omaha Native American, Nathan Phillips, who drummed and sang in the face of mocking high school youths on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “Do not become beast in the fray,” she warns. The poet knows how to survive, “feeding myself on winter light / even in the dark days of trump . . . .” What is clear throughout this volume is that Blaeser does not conceal her politics in nuanced art, rather she uses art to eloquently express her politics. In “Prayer in the Wake of Transience,” she calls on poetry and song to bridge the way forward.

…………..perhaps the purple ache of shadows
will part, emptiness stand open like a portal.
Before this small fissure in darkness, make offerings
of your brokenness. Across the silence—send songs.