The Cuyahoga Valley National Park is home to hundreds of animal and plant species, from poison hemlock and American sweetgum trees to the eastern tiger swallowtail and the North American river otter. Thanks to its climate and geography, the park is ripe for biodiversity.
It’s also ripe for poetry.
“Light Enters the Grove,” a new poetry anthology from Kent State University Press, features 80 poems — each one about a different organism that lives in the park. The book will be released Tuesday, Aug. 27.
The idea for the book came from one of its editors, Charles Malone, who worked on a similar project about Rocky Mountain National Park when he lived in Colorado. Malone is the assistant director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.
A native of Newbury, Ohio, in rural Geauga County, Malone grew up visiting the CVNP. When he returned home from Colorado, he was eager to create a book of poetry about his home park.
While the CVNP didn’t become a national park until 2000 — it was designated as a National Recreation Area in 1974 — the area has a long, rich, and at times complicated history, from early Native American tribes to the construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal.
“It seems that, maybe because Cuyahoga Valley connects these large urban areas, maybe because of the indigenous history, the canal, the railroad, the industrial history, that there are just so many different ways to connect to it,” Malone said.
He continued, “But at their core, I think they all involve two things. One is getting our senses activated outdoors, and the other is probably empathy for the species, for the ecology, for the health of the place and the health of ourselves.”
“Light Enters the Grove” started as an online project. (Of the 92 poems featured on the website, 80 were selected for the book.) Malone eventually recruited two fellow poets as editors: Carrie George of Akron, manager of Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre; and Jason Harris of Cleveland, editor in chief of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review.
While some of the poets asked to write about a specific plant or animal, others were given a random list of options to choose from. The process led to surprising connections.
“People would often say, ‘Oh, that’s my favorite flower from when I was a kid, or ‘I have a special nickname for that bird,’ George said. “And so even though it was random, people had really interesting connections to these species, which I think just goes to show the relationship that we have to the things that are living in this park. Because if they’re living in the park, they’re also living in our region.”
This rang true for Harris as well, whose poem “Be It Dawn or Dusk” highlights the American crow.
“I took it as an opportunity to think about how crows raise their young, because at the time, I had just become a father, and so I was thinking a lot about the relationship between birds and parenting, and how both of our species, how we bring up our young ones,” Harris said.
Malone, George and Harris hope “Light Enters the Grove” encourages people to explore the CVNP and get to know the region on a deeper level. Whenever he goes back to the poetry collection, Malone said he learns something new. It’s an experience familiar to anyone who has spent time in the national park: the thrill of discovering something new that you never noticed before.
“When I read this collection, there’s a much greater awareness, and there’s more a sense of fragility that comes through in some of these poems, greater concern,” Malone said. “I think that’s something that’s really important for us to pay attention to and to hear and explore in writing.”
Book Launch: “Light Enters the Grove”
Tuesday, Aug. 20
6:30 p.m.
Happy Days Lodge (500 W. Streetsboro St., Peninsula)