Book Review

Season of Flowers and Dust
by Gregg Mosson
Goose River Press, 2007
www.gooseriverpress.com.
ISBN 978-1-59713-056-1

Gregg Mosson's Season of Flowers in Dust is a close observation of fall, winter, and spring in the Pacific northwest, in verse that hearkens back to that of the Imagist poets—Pound, Williams, Amy Lowell. Imagism was an early 20th century movement that focused on precisely drawn images and clear, economical language. As William Carlos Williams famously said, "No ideas but in things," so it was the thing itself that was isolated and deeply examined in order to share its essence in a poem, without sentimentality or digressions, as one finds in lyrical poetry. In Mosson's book the 'thing' is Nature in motion, slowly, quietly, and violently changing in large and small gestures: waves "crash" on rocks; clouds "collide" with mountains; grass is "roiling in photosynthesis."

The craft of this book is subtle and sure—assonance and consonance, alliteration, repetition, all creating a delicate, yet strong, support for the images. Word choices are rich and satisfying. We rediscover and reclaim words like viridian, foment, fuguing, arcade. These drop into the poem easily, providing an extra inch of shadow or brighter shade of light, either way, there's more to see and feel as a result.

One element of word play that always creates more depth and surprise in a poem is that of turning nouns into verbs and this book doesn't disappoint: "Rhododendrons peacock from the landscaping" (Harvest of Orange); "Tall tales of day-in day-out/firework around them" (Sunday at the Lutz); "By my door/are bird-prints where/stairs of ice boa around/a blade of grass/striving toward light" (First Snowfall). In a book where the focus is so singular and intense, language becomes a crucial generator of tension, color, emotion, movement. It is often the only human touch in the poems. Mosson uses this technique effortlessly and well.

At first, this lack of the presence of humans (there are mentions of random male names without explanation or development, so they have little impact and don't at all encroach upon what is firmly Nature's territory) or narrative was unsettling and I found myself wishing for the poet to deepen the poems beyond Nature's well-planned, yet mysterious, schedule, into something familiar, but the point of the book is to resist the human urge to explain, to translate Nature into our terms, force it to answer our questions by imposing ourselves on what is seen. The point is simply to see it, purely. That has to be, and is, enough.

If I questioned anything of this book, it was the tendency for lines to break in expected places, on complete phrases, rather than breaking unexpectedly and creating subtext, tension, and texture in ways that would have been on Nature's and the poems' terms, and would have delayed the images so they could coalesce more slowly, as the taste of something is evolves as you hold it in your mouth rather than immediately chewing and swallowing. There was sometimes a feeling of rushing to the next line and not savoring what was already there or beginning to emerge. The poet also has a penchant for one-word lines, which are often used in lieu of punctuation, when a comma would have better served. There is rarely a good reason for this device; it is an easy, and therefore poor, choice for highlighting an idea, feeling, or image. I would have liked to see the poet find a way to order and break the lines and provide emphasis without being obvious. A random example from "So Long Flower, So Long":

Time
feathers
downward
to roots of trees, where spans
a silver surface of the lake. Yet,
all
still
flowers.
And people come
and sit and wonder.

With a different lineation:

Time feathers downward to roots of trees, where spans a silver surface of a lake. Yet all still flowers. And people come and sit, and wonder.

This example highlights the very lovely moment of 'where spans a silver surface,' while still preserving that private silence and the slow movement of time captured, observed. Mosson's talent with language is clear, and I often found myself reordering lines in my head to bring that forth. Such changes would not have overwhelmed the poems, which is a credit to the poet's gift.

The switch to sonnets in the 'Winter' section was a pleasant surprise, and the poems well-executed. It seems appropriate that, during months in which the world is blanketed, and therefore neutralized, by snow, encased in ice, and humans retreat into the boxes that are their houses to wait it out, the poems take the shape of controlled containers of winter's purposeful beauty. It wasn't clear, however, why the turn to form was made, as fall and spring are both free verse sections. If one other section had been assigned a form as well, it would have increased the feeling of transitioning from one season to the next; it would also have been interesting to see which form or forms the poet chose. A case can be made that free verse is appropriate because fall is a (glorious) descent into chaos and spring an ascent into another form of (equally, but different, glorious) chaos, but that case wasn't satisfying enough for this reader.

Despite these questions, Gregg Mosson's Seasons of Flowers and Dust is vivid, thought-provoking, and also meditative, reminding us that one of our many gifts as humans is to observe, to appreciate, and that part of that experience of awe is the unsettling and exciting knowledge of how 'other' is the Natural world, how powerful, and how powerless and insignificant we are within it. This book of poetry is the perfect accompaniment to fall, which is now upon us, and the seasons to come. After reading it, I defy you not to find yourself seeing the world around you with greater depth and wonder, and being richer for it.—Reader Review