Wild Honey, Tough Salt

Kim Stafford

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781597098960
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597098274
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Wild Honey, Tough Salt offers a prismatic view of Earth citizenship, where we must now be ambidextrous. The book takes a stern look inward calling for sturdy character and supple spirit, and a bold look outward seeking ways to engage grief trouble. The book begins with poems that witness a buoyant life in a difficult world: wandering New Orleans in a trance, savoring the life of artist Tove Jansson, reading the fine print on the Mexican peso and the Scottish five-pound note. Clues to untapped energy lie everywhere by the lens of poetry. The book then moves to considerations of the worst in us—torture and war: how to recruit a child soldier? How to be married to the heartless guard? What to say to your child who is enamored by bullets? In the third section, the book offers a spangle of poems blessing earth: wren song, bud growth, river’s eager way with obstacles. And the final section offers poems of affection: infant clarities of home, long marriage in dog years, a consoling campfire in the yard when all seems lost. The book will soften your trouble, and give you spirit for the days ahead.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1
• How to Sleep Cold in North County
• The Secret
• Benign Indignities
• My Iron Catastrophe
• Love Money
• Tove Jansson’s Island
• What Civilization Costs
• Willa Cather’s Ride
• Prairie Prescription
• Nado: the Good Guardian at Ogyen Choling in Bhutan
• Notes from the Storm at Billy Meadow
• Once in the Back Country
• Weaving Kin
• Mediation
• My Critics Have Erred
• Wild Honey, Tough Salt
• It Seemed Like an Ordinary Day until I Had Coffee with Jesus at the Café du Monde
• The Right to Be Forgotten
• Great Old Man
• 2
• Allegiance
• Peace Warrior
• The Torturer’s Wife
• Champion the Enemy’s Need
• How They Recruit Child Soldiers
• Citizen of Dark Times
• Who Knows about War?
• Benazir
• Torture Test
• Suicide Bomber, Algiers
• Pictish Stones
• A Prayer by the Tigris
• Green Zone, Green Earth
• Elementary Lesson
• Mrs. Smith, 1959
• Night Flower Market Along the Water
• Escalation of the Possible
• We Ask the Iraqi Artists What It Is Like to Be Creators Where Civilization Began
• Nadezhda
• Proclamation for Peace
• Beside the Road While Our Nation Is at War
• At the Indian Cemetery on the Oregon Coast
• 3
• A Few Treasured Steps at Glensallagh
• Abe & I
• In My Name
• Earth Verse
• A Buddhist in Cattle Country
• Walking in an Old Forest with Our Young Son on My Back, I See the Fates of My Friends in Every Tree
• Calligraphy of Sticks
• At the Meriwether Lewis Grave on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee
• Listening in the Mountains North from Santa Cruz
• The Bardo at a Crack in the World
• Roe Deer
• Crow & Thistle
• Palouse
• Trail Register at Cascade Head
• Last Wish
• Smoke
• Lucky 4 a.m.
• Ruby Takes a Stone
• 4
• The Berry Fields, 1959
• Wilma’s Wanderings
• A List of Wonders from the Time of Small
• Before I Could Be Human
• Why I Was Medieval as a Child
• When Writing Became Easy
• At Home
• Late Night Love Letter, New Orleans
• Marriage in Dog Years
• August, 1997
• Our Son at One Year Old
• Milk
• Every So Once in a While
• Home Alchemy
• Aunt Mar Changes How We See
• Ten Years After the Last Words
• Kindling
• In a Trance I Figure It All Out
• In the Children
• About The Author
• Back Cover