Another Antipastoral by Vievee Francis
Another Antipastoral
Vievee FrancisI want to put down what the mountain has awakened.
My mouthful of grass.
My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.
There’s a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink
to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the
blinding
beauty of green. Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a
wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe. I have fallen from my
dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-
waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had
forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside? What would rend my fantasies to cud
and up
from this belly’s wet straw-strewn field—these soundings.
SELECTED BY I.S. JONES
I do my best to avoid the word “perfect” for its often fickle and slippery nature—a subjectiveness that is susceptible to the whims of the moment. And yet, I have chased after the feeling “Another Anti-pastoral” has devastated me with for years and years. When I touched down in the Midwest for the first time, I finally understood what she meant by “the blinding beauty of green”. Sight undone by holiness. A witnessing that transmutes the body from the civil to the animalistic. Lush, tender, unflinching, Vievee Francis is the poet of my heart. So much of her way in the world, her strong command of language, her tender eye towards the subject, how she yearns, has colored so much of own writing. I am because she walked before me.
ABOUT I.S. JONES
I.S. Jones is the author of Bloodmercy, chosen by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR / Honickman First Book Prize and the chapbook Spells of My Name, selected by Newfound in 2021 for their Emerging Writers Series. Currently, she is a Senior Editor for Poetry Northwest, where she runs her column, The Legacy Suite, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her works have appeared in Granta, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. While she has lived in many places across the U.S., she gratefully calls Chicago home.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis, published by TriQuarterly, 2015. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Winner, 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category
Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize
Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color
“Another Anti-Pastoral,” the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes “words fail.” With a “bleat in [her] throat,” the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.” (Source)
ABOUT VIEVEE FRANCIS
Vievee Francis is the author of Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. She is an associate professor at Dartmouth College and an associate editor for Callaloo. (Source)
Read more poems by Vievee Francis • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 69 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: transformation • longing • nature • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
