Martha Carlson-Bradley
Poetry, Teaching, Publications
Morphology:
it's the study of structures
where words unfurl--
leaf,
leafing, leafy--
where bodies take on form
and the flippers of the whale
encase five separate fingers--
where Earth itself
records the past:
as granite, igneous,
roughens the crest of this hill--
the world beneath its crust
is burning, fluid.
(from "Root Word," in Season We
Can't Resist; first
published in Entelechy
International)
Season We Can't Resist
The speaker of the poems in Season We Can't Resist strives to find a true sense of scale and context for human
Reviews and Responses
"Season … is a miracle of language and observation. … You can walk through these poems like a forest; you can lose your own body in the bodies of the mushrooms and ferns, the lush and decay of it all. Lyrical and lovely, they're an invocation for the always-changing world."
~Jane Eklund, Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
"Carlson-Bradley … writes as directly and meticulously about nature and its wonders as any writer you'll find. … What can close examination of the natural world tell us about ourselves? A lot. Carlson-Bradley affirms this in poem after poem."
~Rebecca Rule, Sunday (Concord, NH) Monitor
"Martha Carlson-Bradley is unflinching in the way she examines the weight and wonder emanating from each leaf, each spore, shadow, and cry in the world we live in, and the human meanings we bring to such things: metaphoric, sexual, scientific, mortal. Season We Can't Resist is a bold book, full of wit, and verve, and beauty."
~Jane Brox, Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm
"Martha Carlson-Bradley writes as sharply as she thinks, and she thinks as sharply as she sees. With exceptional rigor and maturity, and a naturalist's eye, she renders the natural world and our place in it with preternatural clarity and grace."
~Michael Ryan, New and Selected Poems
"For some poets the natural world with its intimate processes of growth and decay is little more than a vague screen on which to project our own more visible human dramas. That is not the case with Martha Carlson-Bradley. Rather, her spare but unsparing lyrics are wholly alive to nature first on its own terms and only then in searching relationship to the poet. Here are poems that exult in the names of things and bristle with the language of science as well as love, and in them Martha Carlson-Bradley plumbs the deeper 'chemical ecstasy' that binds the smallest manifestations of creation to the largest, and locates our flawed human desire in that superabundance."
~Daniel Tobin, The Narrows