Ear to the Ground by Harriet Stratton

Step onto the ranch where Stratton grew up, where pick-up trucks rattle down gravel roads, coal trains wail through the night. Where a child marvels over a tiny sea shell in the sand, and a young girl rides bareback through the sage. Stratton puts into words the natural wonders and human realities of sandhill country from the dual perspective of innocent child and wise adult. Ear to the Ground is a book about discoveries and dark secrets, about remembering and forgetting. It is a book you will want to read again.

–Barbara Ittner, author of Sistories and Other Tales from the Pink House

Stratton’s work is an ecopoetic which beautifully overlays the relationality of the terrain of the mind with the ever-changing landscape. She asks that we not just track visual transformations brought on by environmental collapse, but that we listen to what is before and behind us. That it is through this act of hearing that we may come to remember the earth sees us, perhaps even more clearly than we see ourselves.
–Andrea Rexilius, author of Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012).

Harriet Stratton’s Ear to the Ground listens deeply through time, passage, and reclamation. Through her loving attention, we experience such magic as “a tulip of flame,” the velvet of a creature’s breath, and larks perched like grace notes on a fence. Soaking all this in, Stratton holds “the shaggy crawl of impending absence” at bay just long enough for us to savor the wonder of the mundane. Family, landscape, a receding way of life—all these, at once ephemeral and eternal, are like the battered work glove Stratton discovers: its lifeline stretched beyond the wear of the glove itself. These beautiful poems absorb all the losses and turn them into solace.

–Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts