The Seeds - by Cecily Parks (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Seeds confronts the ecological paradox of homemaking in an environment domesticity rejects-one of mess, disease, and everyday violence-to explore the equal distress and delight entangled in caring for a family, a new home, and the earth that sustains them. Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity's power to alter nature and powerlessness to control it: an epiphyte's fall from a live oak, an urban creek's response to drought, or a roof rat's nest-building in the attic of the poet's home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth; as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature's intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather. The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks' third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them"--

Book Synopsis

The Seeds confronts the ecological paradox of homemaking in an environment domesticity rejects--one of mess, disease, and everyday violence--to explore the equal distress and delight entangled in caring for a family, a new home, and the earth that sustains them.

Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity's power to alter nature and powerlessness to control it: an epiphyte's fall from a live oak, an urban creek's response to drought, or a roof rat's nest-building in the attic of the poet's home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth, and as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature's intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather.

The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks' third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.

Review Quotes

Recommended by Library Journal

"Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems by Parks (O'Nights). The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures ... Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth."
--Publishers Weekly

"The exquisite earthen poems of Cecily Parks in The Seeds help us feel more embodied, tethered to the earth, our lives, deep time, the nubby fragrances of mystery. Magnificently delicate and wildly strong all at once, these poems are perfect precision of living and seeing, shaped into lines. Mother Being, Human Being, Cosmic Haunted Being, all beings layering, inviting greater presence--The Seeds is a triumph."
--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems

"Hope grows up from these poems, The Seeds, and also the awful horrors that necessitate the continuation of hope. From the first to the last, these beautiful and attentive poems by Cecily Parks opened my eyes and my heart."
--Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

"In Cecily Parks's marvelous collection, the poet acknowledges the vastness of the botanical world, enumerating the many plants that green the world around us and seeing them as the beings they are--present, named, accompanying us. This book has a unity and focus that is the sign of a mature artist deploying her gifts with sensitivity and prodigious skill, and the various meditations on motherhood, on reading, on form, and on the natural world show Cecily Parks as a writer at the height of her powers."
--Mark Wunderlich

About the Author

Cecily Parks is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, and the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in venues such as The New Yorker, A Public Space, the New Republic, and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.