What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
Jane Augustine
if any, repose in grass this June
dried wheat tufts suggest autumn.

Illusion of time: the view towards town
twenty years ago the same, one thinks,

the viewer changed but held, close
to hope, still doubting that green is only

made in the retina.
My son paints Winsor's Green
(Light) on Strathmore paper because it is

that way, and the world less doubtful
than one's thought of it—without

which it isn't . . .
says who? Consciousness
is cellular, says Teilhard, in case

one should forget to bid the swatted cockroach
to become buddha.
Aggression won't

supply green. And could photosynthesis
produce ink for the poet's randomness which

hardly frames art, that neurosis skewing
acceptance?
Getting old? Well, resist

that thought as a reflex fed by newsprint.
But the physical transfixes an internal

metaphysical fear: sooner to die
rather than later, as this cinquefoil's bright

yellow fades, and the chickadee
who sits on my boot-tip is surely not last year's.

Some fat chipmunk, however, steals
birdseed from the finches, and no intervening

helps. Five droplets out of an overhead
cloudpuff threaten this page unpreventably

as the helpless face of any woman
crossing 23rd street at Second Avenue

to think a boon might come from bodies
of students shot in Tiananmen Square.
Logic

won't de-corrupt governments, except
where a word properly lodges its depth

in the fluidity of things, which have a way
of constancy in greens of varying

grays—Payne's Light, for instance, for rocks
that stay mostly unseen, and yet crop out

holding landscape, or land-thought
resembling it, enough to wake you, caught out

in metaphysical blur—self-doubt, as if
good were invisible. Wake you to get up and walk.
from the book TRAVERSE: COLLECTED POEMS 1969 - 2019 / Dos Madres Press
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Cover of Jane Augustine's book, Traverse: Collected Poems 1969 - 2019
What Sparks Poetry: 
Susan Tichy on Jane Augustine's Traverse

"Spare, unselfconscious, nearly transparent, Augustine’s poems reach out to the things of this world like a ship whose constant soundings describe its own location. No part of her lived experience is excluded, so a reader may find herself meditating on a painting, carrying a backpack, searching for a homeless man under a scaffold, or pulled suddenly back to a parent’s death-night twenty years before."
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Color sketches of the 10 debut poets featured in this article
"A Freeing Space": A Look at Debut Poets

"While much of what goes into penning a collection might be illegible even to the poets themselves, they all have ideas about what a book can be—a site of awe, a stay against the past slipping away, a space to bear witness and resist, an artifact of the imagination, and/or a blend of “affect, intellect, and being in the world–ness.'"

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