About the Book
"Restoring Prairie, a beautifully unified collection of
new poems by Margaret Rozga, addresses ecological and cultural history
based on personal engagement with farmland being restored with prairie species.
The poet’s emotional, philosophical and spiritual engagement with the place
lend tremendous depth. Contemplating the pendulum of destruction and
renewal, she juxtaposes poems of hope with laments for the extent of centuries
of development, leaving a mere shadow of historic natural bounty. Other
forms of grief are intertwined including the loss of loved ones as well as
relentless warfare and the ongoing pandemic. Each adds moral complexity
while heightening the impact of the collection. This book can be read as a hymn
and prayer for healing, an act of conscience and a journey of the heart,
calling above all for the courage to hope."
~ Dr. Christian Knoeller, Professor Emeritus of English,
Purdue University Author of Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological
Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change
My Review
Former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga invites us to
join her in a poignant, sensual, visceral year writing at a prairie restoration
project. In celebrating the past and present, emotion, acceptance and forgiveness,
she teaches us be at home in our own company. These eighty-plus poems in five
sections are a plein-air experience using nature for prompts in the appearance
of a yellow jacket stopping on a page, a maple wildly flinging seeds, the
perfect rendition of a sandhill crane call and onomatopoetry of others, as the
author walks and sits and journals on the prairie.
Mining every sense from the touch of ancient tree bark to
the taste of yesterday’s coffee, with a nod to punctuation in “where on the
prairie,” Rozga’s luscious comingling of words such as “then and
then-ner…ephemeral then-ness” add a piquant melody to her lyricism in “English
Sparrow.” Clever spacing and staccato rhythm controls the reader’s breath in
poems like “Power.”
Mostly prose poetry, stories shaped through imagery, some
very short form observances in the delight of the moment, Restoring Prairie is
also a call to action. Rozga says in her introduction, “Restoring what was lost
may start small, but start all the same. On the unfarmed old railroad bed, look
carefully. Find enduring prairie grass and wildflower seeds. Gather them. Plant
them. Each fall more seeds. The prairie the settlers broke begins slowly to
take root again.”
Rozga’s activism shows in the second grouping of poems about
protecting land, protecting memories, an ode to Robert Parris Moses, and
reluctant protest not-poems; the ebb and flow of “Remembering Beauty”: a time
before settlement when visitors were rare and awed by the land of prairie and
river.
Hope is one the major themes woven throughout the book; hope
in renewal of the blooming prairie when the rest of life was caught up in the
pandemic; hope for the future, for moving on and forgiving, and listening. Hope
is in the realization that one can find a comfortable place when life changes: “I
am the…person speaking…as well, the one spoken to” in “You Are Not Here,” and
growth in “Field Staton in April.”
Spend a year with the beauty of the prairie, reflecting on
the seasons of emergence, growth, sleep, rebirth. Restoring Prairie is a
magical journey through time and memory outside of ourselves using mindfulness (underrated),
nostalgia, hope, and the music of the created.
About the Author
University of Wisconsin - Waukesha Professor of English
Emerita Dr. Margaret Rozga creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social
justice issues. She was a participant in Milwaukee’s marches for fair housing
and later married civil rights leader, Father James Groppi. As part of the 50th
anniversary projects honoring Milwaukee’s fair housing marches, Dr. Rozga
served as editor of a poetry chapbook anthology, Where I Want to Live: Poems
for Fair and Affordable Housing. Also as part of the 50th anniversary
events, she convened a housing task force that supported the successful
initiative to close a loophole in Milwaukee County’s fair housing law so that
it now covers people with rent assistance vouchers. She writes monthly columns
for the Los Angeles Art News and Milwaukee Neighborhood News. She leads
poetry and journaling workshops and serves as a civil rights consultant to
community organizations.
