Letters to Boulders by Karen Donovan

WCP's 2025 Best Gift Book

Letter’s to Boulders is a lithospheric ekphrastic hybrid masterpiece. Merging elements of the field guide with imaginative prose poems, and gorgeous color photographs, the book is already finding wide appeal among earthlings of all kinds. [Look for a feature in Orion Magazine in early December, and look at our WCP book shop page to see more. We recently talked with Karen to learn more about the book’s origins and influences.

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“When I was growing up there were woods near our house, which was sort of on the edge of the suburbs. In the woods there was this clearing with some fallen trees, and I went there often. I guess I thought of it as sort of a sacred glen, though I was only nine. I remember one day I was sitting on this log, just sitting, sort of dreaming and when I looked down at the log, I discovered that the log was written on, covered in a mysterious script or alphabet. Of course, it was those trails that beetles leave as they eat the log under the bark, though I didn’t really know that then. What I thought was look, the world is written on! But why can’t I read this alphabet I wondered? I want to be able to.   And I think at that moment I became a poet. This practice of looking at the world with a deciphering eye still has its pull on me. When I began to become interested in the work of geologists, it was partly from this interest in how they are able to “read the earth” in a certain way. They have a kind of lexicon, a vocabulary that they use to describe the earth-shaping events of the past.  Geologists are, as story tellers, masters of  time’s fullness.  

For a while I’ve lived in East Providence right on the water. There is a secret little beach nearby. During the pandemic, unable to go anywhere else, I went to the beach a lot and started noticing interesting rocks, and picking them up to bring home. I think in retrospect that I needed their weight, as if I needed some ballast to keep myself on track in the midst of all that was so unknown. So little by little, I began putting rocks in my pockets and bringing them home until I had a collection of rocks in my basement. Sometimes I would take the stones in my hand, and I felt like there was communication happening. Around this time I began to get really interested in geology texts and field guides to rocks. One of my inspirations is the geologist Marcia Bjornerud and her book “Reading the Rocks” (I quote her in Letters to Boulders).  Leafing through these books I found the vocabulary so rich and evocative, certain terms started to suggest further ideas, branching into the human realm; and I began to feel events and images from my own life resonating with this language. I began to collect the terms in notebooks, that look like this.

As three-dimensional objects, the stones also arrive with different kinds of information, as if each one has a story. I began to explore how their origins related to my stories. I felt that I was borrowing their essence while working with them. I tried to not make presumptions about them but to be open to what they were saying. So that was the genesis of the book. I had this sort of triangulation of the object of the stone (what it was saying), and a geological term, that began to speak to the third realm, that was to my own life experiences and ideas. I think the work is related to ekphrastic writing, only with natural objects. You’ll notice that the geological term doesn’t necessarily relate to the actual qualities or name of the stone pictured, because, well it’s poetry.”

So you were asking whether I think of this work, (in as much as it includes non-human characters)  as a kind of eco-writing or how I might relate it to environmental change. I’m aware of a theme in my life and my work that is about the struggle for Eden.  I feel deeply that behind any real concern about climate change has to be a deep appreciation for the beauty of this planet as a gift. I think I state my poetic orientation pretty clearly in the piece entitled “venus”.

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It’s because my eros is panentheistic, I explain to him, not very patiently. Because it spreads across all things, human or not, from the hot gravy inside the planet to every speck of confetti blowing at us in the solar wind. Like, argon to zircon, I add, a little more generously. But he is having none of that. Nope. This is all an excuse, he says, because you had trouble with your mother. I say: it just isn’t there, I have no desire to copy myself. And then I think: there’s nothing wrong with wanting to love what’s already here. The pollen and coatimundi and egrets and mud snails and greenschist and club moss and all the other noble gases. Also, I need to be able to stand on a spit of sand in the dark while the tide runs over my boots. I am the butter knife of eros, I think about telling him, smearing all creatures in naked beauty and connection to everything else. But I don’t say that, thank god. Plus he isn’t listening anyway because he has all his own ideas about fertility and child raising, and besides this conversation never happens because we are both too young to know what the hell we are doing, and because I would not have had these words back then, and because even though this is the moment my job description was issued, I never realized I had agreed to the assignment and had already begun it, until now.

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A WCP editor recently shared with me Adalbert Stifter’s Motly Stones, (in German “Bunte Steine” or Colorful Stones, trans. by Isabel Fargo Cole published by NYR Books Classics) She was thinking that it is a book, in some ways, analogous to my own. Each of the stories is named for a stone, Rock Crystal, Granite, Limestone, Tourmaline and each of the stories has some characteristic, emotional or physical, that are like the stone. Reading Stifter I felt I was traveling through some kind of  enchanted world. I loved how peopled his landscapes were. Even in the highest empty stretches of the alps there are stories of the people who once lived there. There is always a human story in his landscapes.  Mostly I loved the care and patience of his descriptions, how his stories take place at such a slow pace. I had to really slow down to read it.

This slowness is a quality of stones, of geological time. It is a pace that can be reassuring in these times. - Karen Donovan