Monday, May 6, 2024

Restoring Prairie by Margaret Rozga

 


Restoring Prairie

Margaret Rozga
Poetry, 94 pp
May 6, 2024, Cornerstone Press
$21.95 paper
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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.

 


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