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Foreword

by Kathleen McClung

Honoring moon and sun and all that grows on earth, Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth offers us the opportunity to savor Deborah Kennedy’s artistry and urgency in not one but two branches of creativity — visual art and lyrical poetry. Kennedy is widely known in California and beyond for solo and group shows of her paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and large-scale installations. Her first public artwork, titled Ecotech commissioned in the early 1990s for a new public transit line in Silicon Valley, consisted of a six-ton boulder cut into thick slabs, embodying a key concept of holistic thinking, the relationship between the parts and the whole. She etched and inlaid mesmerizing images into the surface of the huge, polished stone and topped one slab with bronze casting, emphasizing the relationship of technology and nature.

Since that influential public art project — still installed in the city of San Jose — she has continued focusing both her art and her poems on the most pressing ecological themes of our time — climate change, species extinction, cancers from toxic chemicals, as well as our interconnectedness and pathways to healing. I love the arc and architecture of this book, which moves from praising the fundamental web of life in Part One to mourning a damaged and “sinking world” in Part Two to decrying the poisons surrounding and within our bodies in Part Three to encouraging vital new thought and action in Part Four.

The journey we take through this extraordinary book is challenging but ultimately rewarding and revitalizing, as all life-changing journeys are. We see horrors — “wings fold / like crumpled paper, birds plummet from the skies” and “Breast milk is now / tainted, hidden poisons / in a mother’s gift.” And yet we also see images of hope — “Hummingbirds defend beads of nectar crowning my Mexican sage” and “white violets/ dance like tiny angels / on the point of a pin.” Kennedy serves as a passionate, perceptive guide on a journey across time, a journey encompassing floodwaters in Brazil, Colombia, Pakistan, Thailand, Romania, edges of machetes that catch sunlight in the Congo, a jet droning on its way to Australia, Darwin’s “proper London air,” and the forests, trails, and gardens close to our homes.

As a reader, I admire not only the expansive scope of Nature Speaks, but also the balance Kennedy strikes between reason and mystery: we hear in her book a deep respect for the findings and warnings of science and a reverence for metaphor and symbol. The alluring pen and ink images that she couples with each poem vary in concept and style from realistic to surreal, embodying beautifully this balance between the known and the unknown, the proven and the possible. A very different artist/poet in an earlier, less perilous age, William Blake, shared a similar genius on the page.

Kennedy’s poems have been likened to those of Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robinson Jeffers — all Californians attuned to the gifts and scars of the earth. I hear echoes, too, of Adrienne Rich in Kennedy’s poems, particularly “Chalice” and “DNA Rules” and “Fate of my Son” that explore the complex weave of mothering, living, feeling, and thinking in a rapidly changing world. Both Rich and Kennedy give precise words to that which seems just past our reach. Both creative women inspire us as individuals and communities to fuller contemplation and bolder action in addressing local and global environmental problems.

The provocative, sumptuous poetry and art of Nature Speaks awaken us to “hear the coyote’s chorus under the aspen’s stir” and to sense in our bodies how “each thicket pulses with the beat of nature’s deep redemption.” Listen. Turn the page. Discover ancient kin and the newborn. Then listen some more.