WHERE THE GRASS STILL SINGS: Stories of Insects and Interconnection Through narrative, verse, and art, Where the Grass Still Sings celebrates the many tiny creatures that play crucial roles in our ecosystems—as well as the people on the front lines of the fight to save them.
Weaving art and science with inspiring stories of people doing their part to protect insects and the environment, author Heather Swan takes readers around the globe to highlight practical solutions to safeguard our fragile planet. Visit a sustainable coffee farm in Ecuador and a frog expert combating animal trafficking in Colombia. Explore a butterfly sanctuary in an Andean cloud forest and learn about a family of orchid farmers who are replanting a mountainside to attract native pollinators. Meet a bumblebee expert helping Wisconsin cranberry growers, a bark beetle specialist in a new-growth forest in Georgia, an entomologist collecting for the Essig Museum in California, and more. Against a backdrop of climate change, ecological injustice, and impending mass extinction, this book rekindles wonder and hope.
Featuring works by artists deeply invested in preserving the smallest beings among us, Where the Grass Still Sings is a paean to the natural world.
DANDELION
Heather Swan's poems are passionately observed "field notes" from the natural world. There's a reverence here for what's imperiled, a poetry grounded in knowledge, at the same time keenly aware of the limits of knowledge. Alert to accelerating environmental harm, these poems utilize science, myth, children's stories, as well as reports from the crow, muskrat, and cedar waxwing to urge us back from the brink. In dandelion, Swan blurs the distinction between who we are and where we live until borders become bridges, even reverent sites of transformation-"please hold us, enfold us, transform / us the way the lichens / transform stone." These poems are beautiful with useful, as opposed to ornamental, beauty. Beauty is their backbone. When read in the spirit in which they seem to have been written, these field notes, though replete with warning, are also consistently braided with celebration and gratitude, perhaps in service of leading us toward the realization that we have "No choice/but to rise . . ."
-Max Garland, Into the Good World Again: Poems
A KINSHIP WITH ASH
Like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Annie Dillard before her, Swan is a poet of witness, laying bare the price we pay for pesticide use, fossil fuel extraction, excess and ignorance, but in language so beautiful, lyricism so sweet, that even a world of disintegration and extinction retains reason for meditative joy and celebration. Beset by ravage and shatter, the poet finds "the sweet luck / of this life" in a natural and human world "filled with a wild holiness," for "it is at the edge of damage / that beauty is honed." These are poems of elegy and affirmation, of sensory evocation and deep abiding truths. Exacting and passionate, Swan insists it is "No use measuring / how long sweetness lasts." By any measure, it lasts at least as long as we have poets like Heather Swan, and books like this book of marvels, this marvel of a book. -Ron Wallace
Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field
(Winner of the 2017 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award)
“This book is pure gold. To understand the life around us is perhaps the most important thing we can do for our planet, and Where Honeybees Thrive is a huge step forward. We are too inclined to think that the tiny animals don’t matter, or that they’re dispensable because there seems to be so many of them. If you know people with that opinion, please give them this book because it can change their minds.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dog
MORE…
Appearances
TTBOOK Interview https://www.ttbook.org/interview/ecologies-love-heather-swans-stories-insects-and-web-life
Stubborn Praise with James Crews and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:
Writing Into Inhospitable Space: Wisconsin Book Festival with Cherene Sherrard
Galena Center for the Arts
Art and Literature Laboratory
Upcoming Readings
New Poetry Collection:
Dandelion from Terrapin Books
Readings:
October 12, 2023: Book Party
Garver Feed Mill
Madison, WI
November 5, 2023
Reading with Donna Hilbert
Page Against the Machine
Long Beach, CA
November 18, 2023
Art and Literature Library
Madison, WI
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities
of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson