BRAD RICHARD, Turned Earth: Poems, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2025. ISBN: 9780807183755

Reviewed by Claire Raymond

With his heartful new collection of poems, Brad Richard evokes a childhood in the American South and mourns a beloved and complex mother, so forcefully, delicately, and accurately that it left this reader breathless. The collection's title, Turned Earth, invokes gardening, the act of turning the earth, and also it describes the passages through mortality and memory traced in the poems. Place (the southeastern United States), body (the poet’s body and the embodied presences of his beloveds), and memory vivify Turned Earth. In Richard’s poems, the act of writing poetry is a process like turning the earth — writing poetry as turning memory, turning image, returning the beloved dead to the life of words. Turned Earth, as title to this elegiac collection, evokes the turned earth of burial, but with a countering sense that poetry can lift what is lost, not undoing death, but changing its meaning. This poetry delves deep beneath the surface, turning the strata of personal and cultural histories, raising what is vulnerable and cherished into light. The poet’s linguistic dexterity merges with his devotion to gardening to evoke a kind of worship of what the earth is, of how the earth sustains us. 

The collection, divided into five sections, thrums with ghostly presences as past and present entwine through the earth-bound voice of the poet — describing himself with hands in earth, his corporeal longings and loves tying him to earth. Richard writes in the tradition of Andrew Marvell’s “fragrant gardens.” The poems of Turned Earth insistently extend metaphors of gardens and gardening to encompass the writing and living of  life. Before the five sections begin, Richard opens with a gently visionary poem, “How I am Whole” (1). This poem traces a line, a lineage, from idea and to embodied writing, connecting “Écriture” to the body (specifically to the poet’s adult body), and ending  with the poet-as-child remembering the pleasure of his then-childhood body “feeling the glow of the whole day inside me.” In this joy, he turns to ideas and words, “thinking I want to remember this.”

Beyond memories of childhood, an atmosphere of gentle hauntedness infuses the  book. Several poems evoke moments of waking from dreams as encounters with the dead — hearing a dead mother’s voice, touching a long-deceased pet, reaching for gold rings proffered by characters from Tolkien (fictional ghosts), as the poems encounter sensitive connections of past and present. Change, loss, and what we hold onto keep these poems unified and quickened with memory’s fragmentary rhythms. Ghosts return to the speaker who remains grounded in his body and his craft. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he writes in “Tenant” (48) and goes on to describe seeing a ghost, as a three-year-old child in a rental house, a child who is “still there, safe in that light.” In “4 A.M.” (47) the poet recovering from injury writes “pain lights up my window / like daybreak all night” and in exhaustion feels he is  hearing his mother “’Brad? It’s Mom. Sleep, baby.’ But you’re dead, / so who keeps vigil for my sake all night?” These poems keep vigil, holding us safe in encountering loss.

The poet’s mother recurs throughout the collection, a figure mourned and vivified with precision. She, too, was a poet, and startlingly, Richard includes a few examples of her work in the extraordinary long poem “Matrilineage: Homage to Nell Parker (1944-2015),” literally giving voice to the ghost by placing her typewritten lines within his poem, tenderly anchoring the poet’s voice in this matrilineal inheritance of his mother’s  lines. “Zuihitsu of My Mother’s Breasts” (8) brings this sense of continuous linkage into fine relief, stating “my front porch is decorated with fossils my mother pulled from her yard, limestone/ trilobites and brachiopods slowly forced from the earth.” The penultimate stanza from this elegy (the book itself also is a long elegy to Nell Parker, who passed away of breast cancer) juxtaposes the poet’s love of, mourning for, and carrying on the matrilineage of his mother with the deeper history of this earth we inhabit, the ancient trilobites and brachiopods slowly pushed to the surface. Turned earth, here, is not a human action, but rather the earth itself shifting its ground.

Climate crisis flickers in some poems as the poet-gardener notes that, in our era, even the reliable seasons become unreliable. Drought marrs his garden in “Anthropocene Villanelle” (10). Here, Richard continues the elegiac mode of the collection as the earth is mourned in its suffering the consequences of our collective acquiescence to petro-capitalist lifestyles. In “New Orleans Lullaby” (35) the poet engages politics, in a style reminiscent of Federico García Lorca, lamenting gun violence and racist policies that shape impoverished neighborhoods in his city. Likewise, in “Confederate Jasmine (New World Elegy)” (34) Richard laments the bloody history of colonization and enslavement: “Not true jasmine; truer: death / in our mouths at morning, mouths blind / as a ship’s hold” connoting the horrific conditions of enslaved people of the African diaspora in slave ships and the brutal treatment they met once in America. And yet, in the face of such steep griefs, Turned Earth repeatedly returns to love — love for the poet’s mother, love for his husband, love for his students, love for his own embodied pleasure, love for language, and love for this earth and its plants — to find tenderness and sustenance in connection. 

Even as the collection’s arc is elegiac, Richard is often deftly humorous, as with the poem “Craft Talk” (53), which suggests the poet teach the craft of plants rather than words, and with lines like “here is Richard, Coeur de Poulet” in the poem, “Imagine a World in Which All Monumental Lions Are Replaced, Every One, with Monumental Chickens” (55). The line pokes fun at the poet’s name and brings down to size the militaristic Richard, Coeur de Lion. The poem humorously critiques the pretenses of hypermasculine agendas of conquest and the acts of lionization that propagandize such regimes. With such critique, the poem subtly extends Richard’s mourning for the damages we are doing to our mother earth. 

The stable figure uniting these eloquent poems is that of the poet as gardener, evoked in two poems’ titles, “The Gardener (I)” (11) and “The Gardener (II)” (68). This figure of the poet-gardener anchors speaker and reader alike in a devotional practice of care. “The Gardener (II)” ends with the poet coming indoors, kissing his husband’s neck, “and again / fleabane’s blooms turn to white-tufted globes / my breath blows bare.” This sense of the ephemeral life of beauty and longing, the vulnerable force of “bare” breath that is steadied and sheltered in the practices of gardening, writing poetry, and loving whom one loves, makes Richard’s poetry collection a rich and sustaining experience. After reading Richard’s Turned Earth to prepare this review, my copy is dogeared with favorites.