Sweetgrass
By Micah Ling

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

sunnyoutside, November 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934513-25-5
perfect bound, 66 pp., $13

Sweetgrass, by Micah Ling, is a real beauty. It starts with a lineated poem in free verse and proceeds mostly as a set of prose poems, always using clear, straightforward diction. In it, we meet cows, cowboys, and cowgirls, crows and pitchforks, and the sweetgrass of Montana.

We also meet Bill, who drinks whiskey and wears a hearing aid. “Bill explains that we need rain because we need thick grass to grow thicker beef; for him, every June storm is money.”

Surely it’s Bill who speaks in this short poem, entirely in italics, You c’n hang on to that pocketknife all season—you’ll need it. That’s my castrating knife. Daughter-in-law gave it to me a while back. Don’t lose it.

Here, in a cluster of small, rich, densely-packed poems, is the heart of Montana.  People doing what they need to do to survive and to take in the beauty of Big Sky country (a Big Sky that is bigger than any cliché or slogan on mud flaps) and aware of the dangers of the wild and open spaces. “Most times, you don’t want to be where the wild things are.” People who have to castrate cattle, people who know the value of tools and family relationships. Sweet people, tough people.

Though set in Big Sky country, it’s a tiny book, 7” x 5”, easy to hold in the hand or carry around in a large coat pocket. It’s like a diary, and, from the journalistic feel of it, the attention to daily detail and weather, was perhaps composed that way.

Many of the poems set out a list of directions or commands:

“Feel tiny. Look at your shadow compared to the mountain’s.”

“Hike up the hill behind the stables, through thick grass, until your joints pull and you feel the shakes.”

“Taste dust: sip it.”

Several poems include equations, short and sweet:

“sky = blue and land = green”

“town = post office, library, grocery, and bar”

“Mountain air in city lungs: new language.”

But for all its sweetness and simplicity, this book contains drama and fear: fear of drought; fear of fire; fear of grizzly, coyote, mountain lion, wolf, and wild things; fear of being alone; fear of the bad-man, angry-man moon. And not all sweetness is good: “Main Boulder Road wore an overcoat of soot and char and all things fire, and the smell was too sweet, even for the black bears, who crave sap year-round.”

A Midwestern girl, I am unlikely ever to make it to Montana, but Sweetgrass lets me see it, lets me visit. I imagine that Micah Ling, who lives and teaches in the Midwest, in Indiana, will make her way back. Why wouldn’t she? “This is Mecca, this is home; why would there be more?”

And when she gets there, and when you do, reading, “The cattle will still be chewing, the dogs will still be dancing, and you’ll be glowing with sweat and dew and sunrise.”

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Kathleen Kirk is a poet and fiction writer whose work appears online and in print in Apparatus, After Hours, Leveler, Oklahoma Review, Poems & Plays, Willow Review, and elsewhere. She has three poetry chapbooks—Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), Broken Sonnets (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and Living on the Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2010, New Women’s Voices Series #74). She writes about what people are reading in her blog at http://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/.

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