The 50 poems in Follow invite the reader to stray, along paths made by water or deer, into a nearby wild. Through Ozark Mountain forests haunted by crow and coyote, these poems smell of wet limestone, sing with hidden warblers, and resound with surprises--a jawbone, a keyhole of cave, a nameless waterfall. With 14 photographs illuminating its pages like light through leaves, Follow encourages readers to map their own trails of spirit and wonder. The poet notes in her artist's statement, "Wherever we walk--and connect with nature--there is poetry to discover. For me, the joy in that connection often slants into mystery. I need poetry to explore the ledges, the unseen within the caves, the waterfalls without names."
About the Author :
Amy Wright Vollmar was born in southern Illinois and can sing numerous folk songs about frogs, dogs, and mules. Luckily, she also went to Monmouth College to study Yeats and Eliot. Now she lives in Springfield, Missouri, and has learned how to write poetry in a kayak (tip: use a mudproof notebook). She works with first graders at Phelps Center for Gifted Education, because first graders like poetry and mud, too. Vollmar's's poetry has previously appeared in Elder Mountain and Cave Region Review.
Review :
Follow is a collection of lovely poems--the kind of poems only someone who lives close to nature, appreciates its beauty and wonders, and has a keen sense of observation can write. It renders the interaction between nature and humanity in a delightfully reflective manner. Finally, the beautiful photos included in the book augment the imagistic nature of the verses.
--John J. Han, Ph.D., Professor of English and Creative Writing at Missouri Baptist University
Amy Wright Vollmar's Follow is a book of profound identification with the natural world. These subtle, intricate poems stake out their territory in the craggy woods of the Missouri Ozarks, a land of seeps and sinkholes, chert and karst. The speaker who makes her way again and again to a hidden waterfall, her senses attuned to birds, insects, plants, and animals, maps geographic as well as emotional terrain--a deeply observed locale with universal resonance in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver. Follow returns us readers to our central relationship to nature, moments where we are the visitors, not asserting dominance but bestowing attention and imagination. In a time of environmental anxiety, such gestures are as essential and restorative as water that beads from limestone and "still falls-- / drop by / clear drop."
--Hope Coulter, Director, Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, Hendrix College
This is a gallery of mind-photos in which a poet who knows the intricacies of a unique nature-scape follows paths through mountains she knows at a cellular level. Her mission is to document connections to the natural world, then sing of them with a discerning non-sentimental voice so that others can connect with them too. . . . this collection of connections is literally hope in action, and it both preserves and illuminates visceral intersections of Ozark flora and fauna along paths we wouldn't otherwise follow. For her. For us. For the Wildness of the World.
--Mark Spitzer, author of In Search of Monster Fish: Angling for a More Sustainable Planet, Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West, Glurk: A Hellbender Odyssey
Amy Wright Vollmar's sure-footed free verse--whether couplets, tercets, or quatrains--wends its way through the Ozark landscape, so that we who follow emerge refreshed, as from a hike instead of a book, the absence of ego almost total as she skillfully guides us from page to page.
--Gerry Sloan, author of Paper Lanterns and Crossings: A Memoir in Verse
Vollmar's exquisite poems write the Ozarks as a region of mystery, both quietly beautiful and beautifully brutal. By following the author's mapped trail through frost and thaw, one can travel a physical and spiritual landscape to the wide world beyond. Lined with deer paths, waterfalls and hidden caves, a walk through this collection takes the reader on a journey through the wilderness without and within. --Carla Kirchner, author of The Physics of Love
