A Review of New Stars & Constellations by David Cazden (Bainbridge Island Press, 2024) – By Vikki C.

David Cazden’s New Stars & Constellations (Bainbridge Island Press) holds us in tender proximity with the natural world, exploring its delicate designs and notations as part of our deepest human desires and relationships. Maternal love, romance – both nascent and complex, the climatic vagaries of the rich Kentucky landscape, and human sickness form the untamed wilderness of this memorable collection. We learn that in chaos, profound spaces of blessing exist, where old stars and miracles illuminate spiritual pathways to edification.

To say that nature is the beginning of all sentience would be a fitting preamble to the lifetimes contained within these poems. Be it “wild rose and frail hyacinth, tied with its own laces on April lawns”, the “jewels of bromeliads strung like bracelets on wrists of strangler figs”, or the familial terrain weathered across generations— we are placed between a cinematic conduit of selfhood, heritage and the ineffable. The poet weaves the domestic and cosmic into an otherness both intimate and liberating, where deep truths and ecological wonder draw us into a profound symbiosis with the poet’s unrelenting vision. There’s a homecoming to be mapped in difficult memories of loved ones, in death, in “taking a midnight train into November’s distances…”. An enduring beauty that refuses an easy way through, instead choosing the liminal as rewilding— the vulnerable as revelation.

New Stars & Constellations is published by Bainbridge Island Press and is available on Amazon.