Orchard Language by Kathy Pon

Kathy Pon confesses that she and her husband, “Immerse ourselves / in the linguistics of growers,” and so her collection offers the reader a chance to see a life well-lived among the rows of her almond orchards, the aging of those trees, the mellowing tenderness of a marriage with husband and earth. Here are lamentations against encroaching light pollution and the fear rain will not fall, as well as the perceptive notes of a naturalist who looks beyond what is cultivated to those creatures she shares the land with. These poems help us see our place in the world and show us the many faces of gratitude.

–Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems

The speaker in Kathy Pon‘s marvelous collection Orchard Language is an almond farmer, both humble in her relationship to the land and capable with how she tends it. In poems that are lyric, orchard-story mediations, we experience the well-versed cultivation of soil, the green, rain-soaked leaves, the owls’ chattering from nighttime branches; we come to love the birds the speaker loves in their natural habitat–hawks, crows, jays, egrets, sparrows; and we, too, lament over a large looming light from a nearby dairy that obscures a clear view of the nighttime stars. This is a collection that speaks reverently of the land and its inhabitants while not shying away from the destruction humans have wrought. These are poems that explore aging–aging of the individual body as well as a long-time marriage–and in their attention to a life’s inevitable decline, these poems make an intricate connection between human and land. “How can we know what is true,” Orchard Language asks, “when all around/ earth and its creatures sigh/ in equal parts––revolt and mercy?” We enter these poems to feel the tension of the revolt; we read on to understand mercy.

–Jeanine Walker, author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me.

Orchard Language honors the grandeur of the land, language, and legacy of the farm and the farmers. The language of “tender gestures” is delightful. Pon writes, “as we tend to this orchard,/we ourselves are tended,” and it is true, just as her wonderful poems nourish us, too.

–Lee Herrick, Poet Laureate of California. Author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems