Steward of the Blooms: Poems by Camden Michael Jones

In “Steward of the Blooms,” Camden Michael Jones writes: “I lean into this air / as though,written within this summerof a sunrise / there is a whole history of this land.” Here, and throughout his chapbook, Jones conjures another famous leaner (and loafer)—Walt Whitman. Like Whitman before him, Jones writes a poetry in affirmation of both life’smagnitude and life’s minutiae, a poetry that urges its audience to see more, to feel more, and to believe more. To be sure, though, Jones accomplishes this in an idiom all his own. Here is a voice held spellbound by embodiment, by what it is to be a single body within the earth’s larger body, and beyond—to be one of many humans rippling “as / rings on the glass pane of the universe.” Here is a voice with a desire for his body to “create a soil so rich / you could spread me on the moon.” Above all, here is a voice that I trust with the task of tending—to beloveds, to blooms, to words. Because, like Whitman with his “spear of summer grass,” Jones understands that these are all one and the beautiful same.

–Stacy Gnall, Dogged and Heart First into the Forest

I reel, in Steward of the Blooms, from amputated poplar to nebula and back to teeming earth, rooted and lifted as one might feel on a clear summer night, feet sunk into the cool dirt, neck craned, in distant communion with the river trout, facing up stream and nearly still. With formal texture and language that dips, soars, and spirals, Camden Michael Jones’ speaker is just a man holding eggshells, digging into the tenderness of life’s finitude. While these poems ask, What can be done to arrest this lava tide of woe?, they yet lushly exult in the fate of carbon-based and stellar alike to exist until the end as wild / formations held at arm’s / length by physics, burning to connect.

–Irene Cooper, spare change and even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety

Camden Jones’ Steward of the Blooms is a delightful and insightfully fresh approach to environmental poetry. Jones seamlessly combines the philosophical and scientific searches for meaning by giving equal weight to the feathers of a sparrow and gallium arsenide. He takes us from the juniper and sage of Oregon’s High Desert to star clusters observed by the Hubble telescope. We are witness to an ever-dwindling erasure haibun, a sequential visit to the Oregon symphony, a sensory tour through Barcelona, fishing trips, and the death of a star. Jones shows us in this work that science and nature walk hand in hand.

–Mike Cooper, President of the Central Oregon Writers Guild, writing professor at Central Oregon Community College and Oregon State University Cascades