The poems in Blue Heron delineate a passage through grief and change. Here, personal loss is continuous with threats to other species and landscapes. In response, Robinson has uprooted the terrain of language, “what / bestows itself from / the almost-invisible / and its stain.” If these uprootings are casualties of a poetics seeking to redress imbalance and “pollution,” then they are also opportunities to rethink what can exist in the field of poetic language as “roots also quicken, bruise their plural pronouns, lose tune, / forsake terrain by moving through and on it.” And so Blue Heron links poetic process with organic process, presence with the gap we know as hauntedness. The page is not only a resonant physical field, but also a site of dialogue between human and landscape, between lack and manifestation. If these poems constitute a poetics of loss, they are equally a movement toward a poetics of openness, risk, and renewed balance in which poetry shifts as “a form of weather, a form/of following, falling from the form/as it twists.”

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of multiple collections of poetry, including, most recently, Three Novels (Omnidawn) and Counterpart (Ahsahta Press). Robinson has been a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poets Prize.  She has received grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Boomerang Foundation, taught creative writing and literature at the University of Montana as the Hugo Fellow, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at several other universities.