Amelia Friedline finds truth and beauty in the small things
It’s usually worthwhile to pay attention to the small things in life. Seeds. Ducks, Monarch butterflies. Tomatoes. The weather report (admittedly, that small thing can sometimes be a big thing.)
Amelia Friedline
Poet Amelia Friedline certainly pays attention to the small things. And she writes about them in a thoughtful and considered way. She’s assembled some 53 of them in her first collection, In Media Res. She explains her title in a footnote to the title poem. Translated from the Latin, it means “into the middle of things.” But it is also a narrative device to open a story in the middle instead of the chronological beginning.
And that’s what this collection does 0=– it opens in the middle of the story she’s telling, and Friedline is telling a story with the poems. Small things matter.
She makes soup. She waits for springtime. She keeps an eye on this year’s slow-blooming forsythia. She plants too many daffodils (and won’t apologize for it). She reads words that make her heart leap. She starts her day with a list of good intentions and finishes with the sole accomplishment of squashing a fruit fly. She hears someone singing and is startled to discover it’s herself. She finds a poem waiting for her in the day’s coffee grounds. And there’s a starlit night and the color of wheat fields.
This is where most of us find ourselves each day. In the small things. Although I can’t say I’ve ever dreamed about ducks or milking cows, but I do know a little about baking bread.
Dreaming of Brown Ducks
when my heart is restless
i find myself dreaming of brown ducks
and mild-eyed cows
and the cinnamon-colored stripe
between the shoulder blades
of the cotton-tailed rabbits munching clover,
as if the life bucolic did not come
with red-tailed hawks and foxes
and five-o’clock milkings in the frigid dark;
as though the cure for what ails me
could be found in the sheer tilling of the soil
or the kneading, resting, stretching, shaping,
baking of dough for bread.
Friedline in an editor, writer, poet, and photographer (In Media Res includes some wonderful photographs). She writes for Cultivating Oaks Press and her blog Dispatches to Jack at Substack. She lives with her family in the Kansas City area.
I wasn’t simply charmed by Friedline’s poems; I was enchanted. In Media Res is a slender volume; I wanted to read more from this poet self-described as “a woman with / the prairie in her heart / and roots as deep as switchgrass.” (In case you’re wondering, the roots of switchgrass can be five to 10 feet deep, and often deeper.) This collection is a small thing, yes, but it’s also a small wonder.
Photo by Missie, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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Bethany says
The small things are often fascinating the longer we consider them. Thanks for highlighting this collection. I just looked up the book and enjoyed the title poem featured there as well as the one you shared with us here.