Photo collage: On the left is the book cover of Dandelion is yellow with a natural print and on the right is a photo of Heather Swan in the woods.
Heather Swan's latest poetry collection, 'Dandelion,' is out this month.
Heather Swan traces her love of nature to childhood roamings with her dog. The Madison poet, essayist, teacher and environmentalist says her family moved frequently when she was young and she would explore each new area with her dog, from creeks and prairies in Illinois to the mountains in Colorado. “I didn’t have a chance to meet a lot of long-term friends, but I had my dog.” She also spent a lot of time drawing and writing.
The constants, she says, were “art and writing and nature.” From a young age, she was aware of the “fragility of the natural world” and wanting to protect it.
Her road to teaching environmental literature and writing at UW-Madison was a winding one. A six-month volunteer stint in Nepal as an undergrad was “life-changing,” says Swan, and she recognized that whatever good her work was doing for the community there was “dwarfed by what was happening to me as a human being.”
Upon her return she worked as a baker, an artist, a copywriter and illustrator for a marketing firm, and eventually went back to school to earn a master’s degree in English. She came to UW-Madison on a poetry fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and eventually earned a doctorate in literature and environmental studies here.
Swan has previously published the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books) and the chapbook The Edge of Damage (Parallel Press), and environmental nonfiction Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press); a companion piece to that book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, is forthcoming in spring.
Her latest collection of poetry, Dandelion, from Terrapin, was published this month. It’s very much rooted in the natural world.
In the past 10-15 years, Swan says, there’s been a shift in people realizing that “nature writing is not just about beauty but about fragility and destruction, the destruction that we’ve created.”
She thinks there’s “a lot of grief right now” regarding climate change and the future of nature as we know it, and that poetry creates a place for holding the grief. “But I also think there is an element of wonder in every generation, an invitation to connect.”
Swan hopes the poems in Dandelion serve as an invitation to change our patterns. “It feels very urgent now.”
A section of the book is devoted to meditations on the loss of her father. “I think that’s appropriate to include because in some ways the loss of an individual person who’s important in your life is a way of understanding losses on a global scale,” Swan says. “The place I found the most solace was in the natural world. The cycles of life and death were so comforting to me at that time.”
Several of the poems are based on fictional animals like Bambi, Dumbo, Piglet, Kermit the Frog and Wile E. Coyote. Animals from team mascots to stuffed toys “are all around us but we’re so disconnected from the realities of the animals in the world,” Swan notes, “the life of the real animal behind this cute and cuddly character.”
Storybook animals also teach people lessons about what it means to be human, she says, “and I wanted to unpack that a little.”
“Piglet,” for instance, contrasts “Oh tender ear, oh Piglet,/ oh kindest friend of Pooh” to the reality of pigs meant to become bacon: “voluptuous flanks/ flouncing about, fed to fill out/for the plates of men.”
Another more playful, multi-part poem is based on album titles from the band The Cure; this grew out of a poetry challenge set by a friend. “If you have a puzzle to solve, suddenly interesting creative stuff happens.”
She wasn’t a huge Cure fan, Swan says, “but the titles were so odd. And I loved the idea that it was ‘The Cure.’ We all want the cure, right? There were so many things that were problematic in my life, at that point, I felt like I was looking for the cure.”
A series of poems told from the point of view of Noah’s wife reflect on what it meant to save all the animals. “It’s a metaphor for me for surviving really difficult times. In some ways, that’s where we are now.”
Heather Swan will read from Dandelion in a joint reading with poet J.L Conrad at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, at Garver Feed Mill.
