Joy Is the Garden: A Review of Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Lace & Pyrite
Z.L. Nickels
The most neglected book of garden poems you have never read is not really a book at all. Rather, it is a reprint of an unheralded contribution to literature's epistolary project, a small gathering of poems-as-letters by two of this country's best poets, Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Lace & Pyrite received little fanfare or mention upon its initial release seven years ago; to the extent most readers are familiar with this twelve-poem project is as a line item toward the end of either poet's biography. This is a shame, both because these are the collaborations we need more of and because of what it reveals of its participants in their attempt to "[make] sense and record of a full year in [their] respective gardens." We receive a mere six poems apiece (one of which was later expanded into Gay's poem "Burial"), but what we are given speaks to these poet's experience of the garden as well as their relationship to it. This rendering is conceived as a dialectic. Nezhukumatathil casts her gaze inward:
----"Even in this
---draught, I go back to the garden so often because
---I don't know yet how to function in a world without
---my mother."
Gay casts his out:
---"Good Lord the strawberry flowers
---are the pursed lips of ghosts
---I want to know. Yes, today I am on my belly
---for that scant perfume, this invisible parade
---of dying and bloom."
And as the book continues, their positions switch. This is a consideration of the garden: how we tend to it, to ourselves and to the world. They are not the first poets to think about the garden, nor to write epistolary poems to one another, but they are some of the best to do so simultaneously. Therefore, the apt description of Lace & Pyrite-one in which there is both too much being said and too little-is a simple description: this book is a conversation about gardening.
Three years ago, in another conversation about gardening, W.S. Merwin affirmed to the philosopher John Kaag that "there is no time in the garden." This is a powerful organizing concept-not just for thinking the garden itself but also our relation to it. After all, who among us has entered the garden, whether it be a personal plot or the botanical sublime, and never lost their sense of time? But there is more to this relationship than physical space; Lace & Pyrite reminds us that the garden is beholden to the seasons. There is no time in the garden, but the garden feels the weight of time.
https: //crazyhorse.cofc.edu/joy-is-the-garden-a-review-of-ross-gay-and-aimee-nezhukumatathils-lace-pyrite/
