The Cure Is A Forest

By Desi Di Nardo

The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada’s ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible. A journey of introspection and awakening, where life and death, the numinous and the mundane, and dream and reality are subtly interchangeable, and where often the intricate and impalpable levels of the human and animal spirit and psyche are entwined and illumed. {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781550715668

Desi Di Nardo

Desi Di Nardo is a poet and writer whose work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Globe and Mail, The Literary Review of Canada, and The National Post. Her poetry has been featured in "Poetry on the Way" by the Toronto Transit Commission and in the Parliamentary Poet Laureate's "Poems of the Week." It was also performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa for International Women's Day. Her first book of poetry, The Plural of Some Things, was published by Guernica Editions in 2008. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

DESI DI NARDO

THE CURE IS A FOREST

ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 182

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2011  

Contents

The Cure Is a Forest 

A Path for Trees 

Beautiful Vagabonds 

Mist 

Holmes Point Road 

In the Crook of Georgina’s Arm 

Mayflies 

Adrift on Duclos Point 

Big Five Plus One 

Symphony in the Backwoods 

Dogs in Bandanas 

Pefferlaw River 

Ironies of Respite 

Sanctuary 

Morning Glory 

Yesterday and the Day Before 

Ghost Herd 

One November Afternoon 

Secret Gardens 

Crown Land 

Blood and Milk 

Sonnets and Fables 

Tattoos of Flags 

Dressing the Empress 

Night Owls Don’t Blink 

Notes on the Hermit Thrush 

Electric Haze 

The Deep Descent 

Contours of Light 

Badlands 

Unclean 

Webs of Panic 

Bluebird 

Chrysalis 

Firelight 

The Infinite Night 

Waterbird 

Undertow 

Unnamed Streams 

Liquid Trance 

Tree Lines 

If This Is Peace 

Towers of Bowerbirds 

Nectar 

Somnolence 

Broken Window 

Songbirds 

Desolate Night 

Disclosure 

Nothing Can Be Said 

Blue Hour 

Beekeepers 

Wings of Insects 

The Great Dying 

Scrapbooks 

Ritual Masks 

Nameless 

Second Skin 

Amber Lens of the Lone Wolf 

Century-Old Cabins 

Cherry Blossoms 

Acknowledgements 

FOR MY FAMILY OF HUMANS AND ANIMALS

I endured in the bog-dweller’s element; the lily

that breaks on the water in a sudden

disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me.

Pablo Neruda

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

Henry Beston

THE CURE IS A FOREST

Dawn and then

The buzz of cluster flies 

At the opaque window 

Mammals in order 

March in the bush 

Insects housed in

The gall of the goldenrod

Parasites