Cirque & Sky

$15.00

“To catalog ruin is an impulse long-embedded in poetry. Rarer is that vision that, in listing the scars of history and the scars of use, the harms of industry and the land’s blatant abuse, also knows it must sing back against the bruise of real beauty. Kathleen Willard’s Cirque & Sky attunes its lyric eye to the local ecological crises, from the ravishes of pine bark beetles, to the orange bloom of benzene in rivers, to children sledding down radioactive mine tailings.

But rather than lament, these poems, seek as Emerson would have it, that genius that repairs decayed things. Willard’s vision includes her love and her song offers its necessary resistance to ruin.”

Dan Beachy-Quick, Professor at Colorado State University. Author of seven books of poems and Guggenheim Fellow.

Fledge Chapbook Poetry Contest Award Winner 2016.


“To catalog ruin is an impulse long-embedded in poetry. Rarer is that vision that, in listing the scars of history and the scars of use, the harms of industry and the land’s blatant abuse, also knows it must sing back against the bruise of real beauty. Kathleen Willard’s Cirque & Sky attunes its lyric eye to the local ecological crises, from the ravishes of pine bark beetles, to the orange bloom of benzene in rivers, to children sledding down radioactive mine tailings.

But rather than lament, these poems, seek as Emerson would have it, that genius that repairs decayed things. Willard’s vision includes her love and her song offers its necessary resistance to ruin.”

Dan Beachy-Quick, Professor at Colorado State University. Author of seven books of poems and Guggenheim Fellow.

Fledge Chapbook Poetry Contest Award Winner 2016.


Kathleen Willard’s book of poems is a series of pastorals and anti-pastorals set entirely in the Rocky Mountain West serve as an object lesson and a canary in the mine for the rest of the world.  The West is the epicenter for climate change and currently grapples with results of the world heating up.  Furious fracking, numerous Superfund sites, poor air and water quality, super wildfires, floods, drought and insect infestations are subjects that concern Willard.  Her pastorals document her awe and love of nature, while her anti-pastorals warn of consequences of our lack of stewardship to the natural world. Cirque & Sky is an important text in the environmental literary canon.

Cirque & Sky

Eager stowaway ready to board any sailing ship,
I disembark on a different shore,
escape the enslavement of a house. 

Yes, our cottonwoods bleed branches in hot winds,
but I could care less witch grass chokes
yellow daylilies once so lovingly planted.
I long ago abandoned the garden that anchored,

enthralled instead by the genius
of sky point my camera
into clouds intent on enlarging my orbit, 
resume study of my archive

of tin globes and old maps highlighting
the routes of barbarians and Arctic explorers,
culling provision lists,
noting their grand intentions.  

In this decade, I long for pristine landscapes,
for an incognito, to be sequestered
in a secret cirque blushing alpine flowers,
their almost microscopic petals barely
span my fingertips.  
Here, elk have never heard a human voice.