Florence Chard Dacey
What's New?
My latest book
of poems, Rock Worn by
Water, from Plain View
Press, focuses on our relationship with the natural world.
• Florence is currently scheduling readings from Rock Worn by Water and would love to give readings and lead some discussion about our relationship with and responsibilities to the natural world, as locally experienced.
Recent Reviews of Rock Worn by Water
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
With three previous collections to her name, Florence Chard Dacey brings readers ROCK WORN BY WATER. Simple verse with a simple message, her work paints with a vivid brush of her thoughts making for a highly fulfilling romp through the world of poetry. ROCK WORN BY WATER is a treasure for any poetry collection. "Cedar": Oh cedar,/you are cut down now,/gone like the buffalo.//Where is your green?//Where will the deer sleep now?//Who will hide me from the rain?//Oh cedar,/you are cut down now.//Gone is your scent,/gone the blue berries.//In your stump-/Red.
Excerpt from review posted on peacecorpsworldwide.org, by Marnie Mueller
Chard Dacey did not disappoint. She’s a good poet, whose major theme is the place where humans and the natural world intersect, frequently in rapture, though sadly, in these accelerating times we live in, all too often on a collision course. Full disclosure: As an environmentalist and a nature observer myself, I don’t much like flowery poems that use nature as metaphor, nor overly didactic poems that blatantly lay out atrocities perpetrated on the land. But Chard Dacey is neither of those writers, and that’s what makes her poems so fine and interesting. She weaves her praise songs organically out of a deep knowledge of the Minnesota eco-system. She knows her land, her flowers, and her fauna so completely that the wilderness merges effortlessly with her poetic self. There’s no need or room for fancy flights in her plainspoken verse. She deals with the politics of destruction with equal subtlety through the simple juxtaposition of undemanding nature with the follies of insistent human stresses.
In one of my favorites in the collection, “What I Did Not See,” she opens, "A bee complained how I kept him from his cup of purple flower/so I moved on." stanzas that follow posit all the goings-on of nature that she doesn’t see, “But I knew were there —,” and how what she doesn’t see “steadies her,” when she’s far away from the prairie which is her first home. And then in an elegiac tone, she writes, "I know a hill where prairie smoke will write/its pink and purple story every June, even as/machines not far away break the earth to make another road."
Her use in a number of poems of the beautiful prairie smoke flower — they cover the prairie floor in spring, dipping their heads in the wind and from afar look like carpets of rolling smoke-made me wonder if she intended this as a political metaphor. Is this the prairie fire plumes of environmental activism, an antidote to the rolling thunder of destruction? Though it worked that way for me, I would guess she’d tell me that I’m reading too much into the image. Her touch is light in her lyrical and oft-times ecstatic political poems. She pays reverence to the world of barnacled whales in the powerful “With the Whales.” and mourns the death of a 4900-year-old tree killed in the service of scientific inquiry, in the ironic “Old Tree”; she admires the wolf packs that free their wild spirits by chewing off telemetric collars, in the sad yet hopeful “Collar,” and in “Waves,” a poem that gently urges the reader toward activism, she wonders, “Do you think waves imagine anything?”
This is a volume of excellent, strong poems. My only caveat is that by the end one has the feeling the book has gone on too long by a few tonal beats. The subject matter is so much of a piece that I felt the book would be better served by dropping five or six of the weaker, reiterative offerings.
But that said, any of these poems could be used for testimony in public hearings, as Chard Dacey herself did with her poem “Certificate of Need” before The Minnesota Waste Management Board or equally as well savored in some quiet spot where one can take the time to contemplate the beauty of her language and the world she so lovingly depicts.
Here are two poems from the book:
Invitation
All day the wind tries to seduce me,
her face all gentle creases,
her supple voice full
of compliments I credit.
Come away!
You can still tap-dance
down this hill.
The wind hides coyly in the oak
till I shake her with my bold fantasy.
i have young breezes in my old blood.
She can't resist,
ancient wind
whirling in her white
stripped way, falling down
and getting up and holding
out her whistling hands.
Certificate of Need
“The Minnesota Waste Management Board may certify need for a repository for hazardous waste only if it has determined there are no feasible and prudent alternatives.”
What is feasible and prudent
when a trust is broken,
the atom split,
any cold war begun?
The earth is afraid of us.
When we have taken anyone
any way against her will or his,
it is prudent to come weeping
however we can weep,
with ideas or jokes
or what we are most, water.
And with many, many small
generosities in our hands.
And it is feasible that we lie
on the earth as if it were our body
and be mouth a moment
for one syllable of its pain.
Maybe even necessary.
Because the earth we all claim
we want to protect
is not filing her comments here.
She has no legal counsel
and doesn’t understand
words like negative impact
and intrinsic suitability.
Only one word keeps appearing
on her certificate of need:
Listen.
• Florence is currently scheduling readings from Rock Worn by Water and would love to give readings and lead some discussion about our relationship with and responsibilities to the natural world, as locally experienced.
Recent Reviews of Rock Worn by Water
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
With three previous collections to her name, Florence Chard Dacey brings readers ROCK WORN BY WATER. Simple verse with a simple message, her work paints with a vivid brush of her thoughts making for a highly fulfilling romp through the world of poetry. ROCK WORN BY WATER is a treasure for any poetry collection. "Cedar": Oh cedar,/you are cut down now,/gone like the buffalo.//Where is your green?//Where will the deer sleep now?//Who will hide me from the rain?//Oh cedar,/you are cut down now.//Gone is your scent,/gone the blue berries.//In your stump-/Red.
Excerpt from review posted on peacecorpsworldwide.org, by Marnie Mueller
Chard Dacey did not disappoint. She’s a good poet, whose major theme is the place where humans and the natural world intersect, frequently in rapture, though sadly, in these accelerating times we live in, all too often on a collision course. Full disclosure: As an environmentalist and a nature observer myself, I don’t much like flowery poems that use nature as metaphor, nor overly didactic poems that blatantly lay out atrocities perpetrated on the land. But Chard Dacey is neither of those writers, and that’s what makes her poems so fine and interesting. She weaves her praise songs organically out of a deep knowledge of the Minnesota eco-system. She knows her land, her flowers, and her fauna so completely that the wilderness merges effortlessly with her poetic self. There’s no need or room for fancy flights in her plainspoken verse. She deals with the politics of destruction with equal subtlety through the simple juxtaposition of undemanding nature with the follies of insistent human stresses.
In one of my favorites in the collection, “What I Did Not See,” she opens, "A bee complained how I kept him from his cup of purple flower/so I moved on." stanzas that follow posit all the goings-on of nature that she doesn’t see, “But I knew were there —,” and how what she doesn’t see “steadies her,” when she’s far away from the prairie which is her first home. And then in an elegiac tone, she writes, "I know a hill where prairie smoke will write/its pink and purple story every June, even as/machines not far away break the earth to make another road."
Her use in a number of poems of the beautiful prairie smoke flower — they cover the prairie floor in spring, dipping their heads in the wind and from afar look like carpets of rolling smoke-made me wonder if she intended this as a political metaphor. Is this the prairie fire plumes of environmental activism, an antidote to the rolling thunder of destruction? Though it worked that way for me, I would guess she’d tell me that I’m reading too much into the image. Her touch is light in her lyrical and oft-times ecstatic political poems. She pays reverence to the world of barnacled whales in the powerful “With the Whales.” and mourns the death of a 4900-year-old tree killed in the service of scientific inquiry, in the ironic “Old Tree”; she admires the wolf packs that free their wild spirits by chewing off telemetric collars, in the sad yet hopeful “Collar,” and in “Waves,” a poem that gently urges the reader toward activism, she wonders, “Do you think waves imagine anything?”
This is a volume of excellent, strong poems. My only caveat is that by the end one has the feeling the book has gone on too long by a few tonal beats. The subject matter is so much of a piece that I felt the book would be better served by dropping five or six of the weaker, reiterative offerings.
But that said, any of these poems could be used for testimony in public hearings, as Chard Dacey herself did with her poem “Certificate of Need” before The Minnesota Waste Management Board or equally as well savored in some quiet spot where one can take the time to contemplate the beauty of her language and the world she so lovingly depicts.
Here are two poems from the book:
Invitation
All day the wind tries to seduce me,
her face all gentle creases,
her supple voice full
of compliments I credit.
Come away!
You can still tap-dance
down this hill.
The wind hides coyly in the oak
till I shake her with my bold fantasy.
i have young breezes in my old blood.
She can't resist,
ancient wind
whirling in her white
stripped way, falling down
and getting up and holding
out her whistling hands.
Certificate of Need
“The Minnesota Waste Management Board may certify need for a repository for hazardous waste only if it has determined there are no feasible and prudent alternatives.”
What is feasible and prudent
when a trust is broken,
the atom split,
any cold war begun?
The earth is afraid of us.
When we have taken anyone
any way against her will or his,
it is prudent to come weeping
however we can weep,
with ideas or jokes
or what we are most, water.
And with many, many small
generosities in our hands.
And it is feasible that we lie
on the earth as if it were our body
and be mouth a moment
for one syllable of its pain.
Maybe even necessary.
Because the earth we all claim
we want to protect
is not filing her comments here.
She has no legal counsel
and doesn’t understand
words like negative impact
and intrinsic suitability.
Only one word keeps appearing
on her certificate of need:
Listen.
Recent Publications and
Awards
Minneapolis painter Pat Olson titled her painting
about wind on the prairie to be exhibited at Gustavus Adolphus
College this fall in honor of their new campus wind turbine "Love
the Invisible" after Florence's poem, "Diperse," which appears in Rock Worn by Water.
"Home" published
in Beloved on the Earth:
150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude from Holy Cow! Press, Duluth,
MN.
Through a SMAHC grant, Florence created poetry
that was part of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask
Theater’s 35th annual May Day Parade and Ceremony. Several of
Florence's May Day poems can be viewed here. One was
translated and read in five languages as part of the ceremony in
Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. Florence’s participation was
also cited in an article in Vita.mn.
The poem "After All of My Life"
was winner in the What Light Contest
sponsored by mnartists.org and Magers and Quinn Booksellers.
"Prairie
Weather" and two poems
from Maynard Went this
Way appeared in the
County Lines anthology for the Minnesota
sesquicentennial.