Review: The More Extravagant Feast: Poems

The More Extravagant Feast: Poems by Leah Naomi Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With eloquent simplicity and an eye for the telling detail, Leah Naomi Green writes poetry that encompasses nature and the very personal into a lyric tapestry. The growth of her daughters in her body and then--after they are born--outside that body.

"This is the way we came
to remember the world."

The likening of a wood stove being opened on the first cold day of Autumn and finding they had prepared wood to burn with the opening of her body in a C-section to the separate life of her daughter.

"i believed
at least one of us
must know the way"

The father who kills and dresses a deer for them to eat as a sacramental act.

"It is all I see,
a thing, alive, slowdown becoming my body."

"When we eat,
what we eat is the body

of the world"

The death of her father and faith in life as a candle of flickering light embodied in wax

"whose job is not to spark,
or hold a flame, but to keep the lit wick steady,
constant and disappearing."

A moving, personal, yet universal collection.

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