Eva Skrande
Planets of Asters
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
My up-till-now non-green thumb is proof that plants mystify me. I’m not sure what made me turn my poems into gardens, but they’ve claimed, if not demanded, their rightful space in the poems. I loved studying botany and learning how plants reproduce, how you could make them grow taller or wider, how some plants needed sun in the forest canopy while others might flourish in the undergrowth. Still, despite a class in botany, they remain, literally and figuratively, mystical: where do they get their beautiful colors from, can they hear us talking, do they listen for their enemies, how do they welcome their friends.
Flowers often call to me when I’m sitting down to write. In my poems, flowers are a complete universe spread by the insects and birds of the imagination. They sustain and are sustained not only by the life of living creatures, but by the living lives of poems as well.
Photo Credit: Nathan Colby
Eva Skrande’s third book, The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World, is forthcoming in June from Finishing Line Press. Her publications include My Mother’s Cuba (River City Publishing Poetry Series) and Bone Argot (Spuyten Duyvil). Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Cortland Review, and elsewhere. In her current transfiguration, she teaches for Writers in the Schools and tutors at Houston Community College.