Description
Helen Matthews Lewis is an activist, sociologist, public intellectual who has written a series of poems addressing social issues. At 94, Helen observes, “As I got too old to sit down in front of bulldozers in protest, I began writing poems of protest.” Her dozen poems focus on the flowers, weeds, and flowering trees that abound in her native south and central Appalachia, from the earliest spring redbud trees and forsythia, to the intruder Bradford Pear, through summer’s Queen Anne’s lace, and that harbinger of fall, Joe Pye Weed.
Patricia Beaver, anthropologist, watercolorist, and editor with Judi Jennings of Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia, has developed a series of watercolors to reflect and illustrate the sentiment of some of Helen’s poems.
Praise for The Nature of Things
In The Nature of Things: Poems of Flora and Protest, Helen Lewis gives us in this slim collection nature lessons, a history, cautions, a call to action, and prophecy. A lovely chapbook that is full of evidence of Appalachia’s beauty and complexity.
—Darnell Arnoult
Widely known and loved for her books and articles, leadership and action, food and friends, now Helen Lewis gives us further inspiration and insight through these poems of flora and protest. Her resilience and wisdom are like the seasons—always expressed in new ways, but constant and comforting in their presence.
—John Gaventa
A rowdy hosanna; a pocket guide to our evolution and revolution. You will keep it to hand through every season.
—Robert Gipe
As in the often beautifully illustrated medieval bestiaries, which described animals and offered moral lessons derived from them, Helen Matthews Lewis’s The Nature of Things: Poems of Flora and Protest, calls us to perceive the Appalachian landscape and its common trees and flowers with a transcendental eye. In “Redbud Trees (Flowering Judas)” for example, we are enjoined to “recognize kinship” and “interdependence,” and to “Obey The Laws of Nature” which the trees in their beauty and abundance represent, and whose extinction, threatened by mountain top removal, Lewis cries out against. With their mixture of botanical detail, historical connection, and social injunctions, these poems invite a new relationship with Joe Pye Weed, Queen Anne’s Lace, Black Locust, among many others. Masterful illustrations by Lewis’s long-time cultural collaborator Patricia Beaver celebrate the threatened beauty and botanical diversity of the Appalachian region.
—Richard Hague
Long known for her work of supporting Appalachian communities as they define and transform themselves from the inside out, Helen Matthews Lewis has now turned her sociologist’s eye—and ear—to the natural world. In the opening poem to her new book The Nature of Things: Poems of Flora and Protest (exquisitely illustrated by her friend and colleague, Patricia Beaver), Lewis entreats us to “Listen to the prophets, the hemlocks, the dogwoods, / fish in the streams, the bacteria in the soil, all living things.” Sometimes humorous, often pointed, poignant and always wise, these poems of dogwood, forsythia, Queen Anne’s Lace, okra and even the poet’s “old green pickup truck, / half-strangled with honeysuckle,” teach something of what it means to be “part of creation, / interconnected to all living things.”
—Pauletta Hansel
Few poetry collections can serve as a reference for herbal remedies and culinary and linguistic history. But in The Nature of Things, as in all her work, Helen Matthews Lewis is an original. Activist, naturalist, scholar, and wise woman, Lewis praises the resilience and healing offered us by goldenrod, dogwood, Queen Anne’s lace. She catalogs her life of labor for the land in “My old green pickup truck” and reveals “community… mowed down” when Joe Pye, Queen of the Meadow, becomes a refugee. Like that “ancient healer,” Lewis is both “seer and prophet.” We need her words.
—George Ella Lyon
Powerful activism arises not from anger, but from love for what is natural and just. Helen Lewis’s poems and Patricia Beaver’s illustrations show us “a trail of blossoms to War…” where these two artist / activists wait on the shores of justice, “gently waving, promising another year of survival.”
—Dana Wildsmith
