Mary Dean Lee’s Tidal reminds me of the Brazilian poet Cora Coralina, who published her first poetry collection at the age of seventy-five – a well of memories overflowing.

Lee finds poems in marshes, rivers, flowers, stones, wolves… Humans too, playing and forsaking the piano, learning to drive, and struggling for civil rights during Jim Crow. There’s a deep ecology in Tidal that doesn’t treat humans as separate from nature; instead, it blurs the humanimal distinction, winking at ambiguity:

Small sac in their throats vibrating […]

they hug or hump whatever is near:

logs, rocks, trees, shoes,

until a female appears.

These poems were lived before written, the definition of “confessional poetry” according to Barrett Warner, whom Lee thanks for helping shape her book. Some pieces feel as if from a different time and place – because they are – and the political realm is not as vivid as the private. The more personal poems, though, feel timeless. Take “Quench,” which opens and closes with someone named Alice visiting the Oconee River. Between Alice’s visits are entire lives: saving one child from mercury poisoning, letting another go after a car crash. As the poem circles back, the quench isn’t sated, but the river never closes either. And Tidal is very much alive.mRb