How to Fly by Barbara Kingsolver: book review

How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons (2020) is a collection of over 60 poems.

The author splits the collection into seven themes: (1) How to Fly, (2) Pellegrinaggio, (3) This is How They Come Back to Us, (4) Walking Each Other Home, (5) Dancing with the Devil, (60) Where it Begins, and (7) The Nature of Objects.

The How to section is great if you want to, via poems, know how to be married, how to do absolutely nothing, or how to be hopeful. Pellegrinaggio contains poems of the author’s time in Italy, and making peace with her family. I like the poem, Lemon-Orchard Blue.

The third theme is a series of odes to her relatives: A.R. Henry (1898-1970); Lillie Auxier (1881-1965), and her mother Virginia Henry Kingsolver (1929-2013). Here, the author is making peace with the departed.

The fourth theme, Walking Each Other Home, contains my favourites: Six Women Swimming Naked in the Ocean (but here in the midnight ocean/they just float/like jellyfish); and Blow Me – (down, Like a hurricane).

The Nature of Objects is also wonderful, with poems about Australia and about its flora, fauna, and landscapes, such as matabele ants, the desert, coral reefs, sea creatures, the slate-scrabbled pathof the Great Dividing Range, and ancient trees.

What I like most is that the author begins with hope and ends forever hopeful.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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