The Earth Has Been Too Generous, by Susan Marsh

From Susan Marsh of Jackson, Wyoming comes a beautiful chapbook, The Earth Has Been Too Generous (Finishing Line Press, 2022), a collection of 21 evocative poems drawn from a life lived largely out of doors. Susan’s strength is in her eye for specific detail, as seen in this stanza from “Hooded Merganser”:

Secretive and solitary, epitome of elegance
His slender bill, a razor in a scabbard
His head a crescent moon that spreads
Into an open fan, like my outstretched hand.

Many of the poems are celebrations for the good fortune to live in a “generous” world. From “At the River’s Edge”:

Elk find refuge in the forest
I shelter behind a driftwood log
Rain-polished stones at the water’s lip
O sweet small cup of sand

Some are laments for the diminished world, as in “Elegy for the Cranes,” where in a “prairie…made for their millions,” only a few dozen arrive to seek shelter, and  in “The Hunters”:

Where will the red-tails hunt,
Razor-eyed on summer winds
When all this broken country
Grows cul-de-sacs, not grain?

Out of the poems as well a kind of moral authority arises, to do all that can be done, as in this stanza from “Asset Protection”::

Let us protect our assets:
Bright, laundry-day air
Water we can drink
A place to walk and daydream
The rush of water, the earth’s eternal quiet.
A land we share
With those whose lives depend upon it,
Including our own, 
Including otters, eagles, bears.

Susan Marsh has contributed to every issue of Deep Wild Journal in a variety of genres: poetry, nonfiction, and art, a remarkable feat given that the editors read submissions anonymously. The journal would be less rich without her!

Click here to order a copy of Susan's book.