Northern Oracle by Kirsten Dierking

(Spout Press)

Kirsten Dierking’s family traces its roots to Finland, and some of her relatives are Sami (Laplanders). Sami culture, and epigrams from the poetry of Sami poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, frame Northern Oracle, Dierking’s second book of poetry. Only a handful of poems in the collection are about the Sami, but the meditative imagery of lakes, forests, and snow in Dierking’s native Minnesota could be describing a Nordic scene. From the title poem: 

Sometimes I think the future begins
at the bottom of lakes. The next day rising
toward sound and action and easier 
breathing. Darkness wanting 
the candor of daylight, the simple shapes
of high noon, the plain faces with no
shadows.
The language has a Nordic undercurrent as well. Notice the ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds, and the long and short ‘a’ sounds in the opening lines of “Sauna on the Paurus Farm”: “My parents used a battered dipper / To ladle water over the fieldstones.”

Dierking’s poems range in topic from art (reading John Berryman; a painting by Frida Kahlo) to natural surroundings (an old barn; sparrows at a feeder), to the personal (moving out of a house; being driven to the emergency room), with a separate section is set aside for the 9-11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Throughout she employs a certain economy of symbolism, recalling Pasternak or perhaps Lorca, that illuminates the poem from within. This is most striking, perhaps, in “Blue”: 

Out in the yard,
the thickening sky

settles into
the empty trees.

Only the cloth
of your blue robe

keeps you from drifting
apart in the gray.
Wearing that blue robe, Dierking leads us through a poetic landscape that is grounded and familiar and quintessentially Minnesotan, but at the same time has a weightless, mystical quality—a place of transience where geese fly off into a veil of snow, where the future lies at the bottom of lakes.

- Joel Van Valin