Tell the Turning by Tara K. Shepersky & Lucy Bellwood

I go to the fields and bow to the single hawthorn…

Sometimes a thought, or a whisper, or a dispatch, Tell the Turning unfolds as lyrical journal, hymnal, and almanac all rolled into one volume, with its three poem cycles interweaving thematic rhythms and threads.

It is an ambulatory archive, paced to poet Tara K. Shepersky’s steps and treks along a stretch of the Pacific coast, from Oregon up to Washington and down to California. Then there’s a circadian and seasonal rhythm, with Tara attuned to the tug of moon on tide and tide on poet; the balance (and present-day imbalance) of the seasons; and the slumbers and awakenings of the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants.

And there is the meter of Tara’s language: shifting between melic lilt and consonantal clamber, inflected by stubborn disheartenment and equally stubborn inspiration, a need for solitude and a yearning for fellowship.

Throughout Tell the Turning, artist Lucy Bellwood’s ink-and-wash illustrations both frame and join the poems. Lucy’s gently exacting studies of flora and fauna, and her comfortably broken-in diorama landscapes, become a space for poet and artist to meet and compare notes as they set off on a quest for the everyday holy, with the independence afforded by true kinship.