Susan O'Dell Underwood

The Book of Awe Susan O'Dell Underwood

The poems in The Book of Awe remind us through images of the natural world--clover, vetch, chickadees, honey bees, rainbow trout--that awe is rooted in the simplicity of awareness. Awe, we're reminded, is not the lightning bolt of grandiose surprise, which tends toward alienation. Instead, awe is fostered by rapt attention. Awe creates kinship between mere awakening and understanding. But beyond the initial native recognition in these poems of creation's urge, there is a devastated awareness of environmental disaster. Nature is no longer whole and pristine, if we are truly attentive. The Book of Awe is also about reckoning with environmental decimation all around us. Here on these pages is native naivety balanced with ugly recognition, worshipful attention but also fury, sanctuary and disruption, blessing and culpability. The poems draw their power from the ecological condition for spirituality: the belief that the physical and emotional status of humanity is inextricable from every other spirit on the planet. If these poems preach, the sermon is about perception. By naming the ineffable we are brought deeper into the stunning cosmos. Only with true practiced awe may we see what the simplest lives reveal to us: "There is no place so small it doesn't need a name."