If I Had Said Beauty

If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland’s fourth collection of poetry, is dedicated to “known and unknown” ancestors. It explores the possible narratives and distant origins of what lies behind a sense of self—including recent and ancient DNA, recessive and dominant traits, mitochondrial underpinnings, and an intricate microbiome. Luminous and spare, the poems seek to unravel and speculate, document and lament what happens in a life and what might have been.  While probing for definition in the mysteries of deep time, the poems are nevertheless grounded in encounters with wild and domestic life, intimate moments of loss and family connection, all of which intertwine to expand the meaning of “autobiography.”

“If I Had Said Beauty delivers more beauty with each reading—and what a joy it is to read this book. Poet Tami Haaland’s brief, lucid lyrics steer us through our inheritances, from genome, to body, to the wide world in which we construct a self. Thinking of a backyard ash tree in her beloved Montana, Haaland constructs a community, it’s as if she cannot help it: “[b]eside it, a history/of juniper, news of pansies and petunias. /A society of ponderosa and spruce.” In these poems, all the spirits are welcome members of her community, an atom, a spruce, a fly, and the ghosts of her ancestors who are suddenly near, and alive. These poems show me how to remain open to the influx of beings, and how we might allow their various beauties to aid in our survival.”

— Connie Voisine, author of The Bower