by Jesssica Fox-Wilson

Yellowrocket, by Todd Boss

“Nature aches at the seams with both tenderness and savagery, which makes it a divine puzzle, a great work of art.”

Todd Boss’ first book of poems, Yellowrocket, is firmly rooted in a sense of place. The book centers on the landscape of the upper Midwest. As such, its poems are populated with images of farmsteads delineated on maps, violent storms wreaking havoc on a harvest and stands of trees that line the edges of properties. Mingled with these poems are poems that examine the workings of personal relationships — between husbands and wives and fathers and sons.

Several poems throughout the book combine these two seemingly separate themes. For instance, in a poem that appears near the end of the collection, “What Yesterday Appeared a Scar,” the narrator ponders his marriage while watching a frozen lake. He writes: “ … My sorrow / is tomorrow’s only season, / and it comes on now // like this cold thaw comes / upon the lake / or like the soft song one sings to sing / the past to sleep / only to keep it wide awake.” In images such as these, the beauty and austerity of the landscape mirrors the narrator’s sense of sorrow and longing.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Todd Boss about his writing about landscapes and relationships and how those two are connected for him.

Yellowrocket includes poems that examine the natural landscapes of the narrator’s childhood home, as well as poems that explore the shape of intimate relationships, such as those between a husband and wife. In what ways has writing about external landscapes informed your writing about emotional landscapes?

I guess it’s all bound up in my understanding of “God,” or whatever you want to call the creative forces behind the universe.

It’s negligence to call it science, I think. Nature is more than a confluence of geological forces; we are of the same stuff, and so we are mirrored in nature, and vice versa. Therefore, nature has two brains, a right and a left. It has a soul and it speaks and thinks and has ideas about itself, though perhaps none of these are conscious.

Nature aches at the seams with both tenderness and savagery, which makes it a divine puzzle, a great work of art. Maybe all nature writing is ekphrasis.

Nature exhibits both conservative and liberal tendencies. Maybe all nature writing is peacemaking except that which fails to be truthful.

To write truthfully about nature is to write about a conflicted chaos of personalities, deities, impulses and relationships. Any exploration of nature’s aspects is also by default an exploration of one’s own, since we have only our own to explore from.

So I guess I must excuse myself from your question. My writing about the natural world does not “inform” my writing about emotional landscapes. They are in fact the same thing. In poems about my turbulent marriage, my wife is cast variously as a force of nature, an absence, a wild rose, etc. Meanwhile, my poems cast nature as a dark muse, an oncoming train, a bridal couple. And then god keeps reappearing, as a poker player and a lousy poet.

It’s possible to think of ourselves as the consciousness of the planet. Nobody makes any sense of it but us, after all. And yet, our consciousness itself was bestowed upon us. Some want to think this happened by chance, but then isn’t chance the responsible divinity? We are all religious. We all believe in something, for even nothing is something. I believe that to write about the world is to study the sacred (the mystery) and the profane (the self), and that no conversation about one can preclude the other.

Order Yellowrocket from Amazon. Find out more about his work at his website.

Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, and attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN and received his MFA from University of Alaska-Anchorage. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Boss lives and works in the Twin Cities.