Recommended: ‘Wild Cucumber,’ a new collection by Ann Spiers

Those who know the power of poet Ann Spiers’ singular and soaring voice, rejoice: her latest collection of new and selected poems, “Wild Cucumber,” has now been published by Empty Bowl Press.

Spiers — revered as the island’s inaugural poet laureate and a pillar of its poetry community, as well as for her dedicated work in Vashon’s conservation and environmental circles — will launch the book at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 27, in the back garden of the Land Trust Building, at 10014 SW Bank Rd.

Publishers John Pierce and Holly J. Hughes will be in attendance that afternoon, celebrating and selling books.

The book has earned rhapsodic praise from fellow poets, including Heidi Seaborn, author of “Tic Tic Tic,” who declared that the new collection firmly establishes Spiers as “one of the great Pacific Northwest poets” — a fact already known by her island devotees.

Sati Mookherjee, author of “Eye” and “Ways of Being,” praised the book’s poems as “painterly — juicy, vivid language pulled across the page in sure and sharp brushstrokes.”

Skipping between past, present and the eternal, the poems in”Wild Cucumber” are set in both lush and haunted landscapes — the beaches and forests of the Pacific Northwest, the canyons of the Southwest, and labyrinth cityscapes in Mexico and Thailand.

And indeed, Spiers chronicles these places, and the people who inhabit them, in painterly and even, at times, sweepingly cinematic verse.

Her poem, “Mrs. Kirk Tells Her Daughter,” begins with the literary equivalent of a master cinematographer’s establishing long shot:

“The avalanche sieves the men / through the trees in a white rush / of snow, then wallops the cabin, / walls leaning, white cold pressing through the rooms.”

Then, Spiers sweeps inside the frigid hell of what, and more importantly, who, is left inside the abode:

“The wood stove remains intact, / and she has enough room to squat / and her daughter to sit in near dark, / fire flickering, eating oxygen”

Next, Spiers dares to come in even closer, sharing the mother’s whispered, heartbreaking legacy to her daughter:

“and she has enough time left / before she dies to tell the girl / how to run the house, and finally / how to make biscuits: two and a half / cups of flour on the board, half pound / of butter in that, a cup of powdered sugar, / and with your hands, work it together, turn it only once.”

This is only one of almost 60 poems — though not all are as grief-laden and apocalyptic — telling the stories of mothers, daughters, wives, and grandmothers, among others — all distilled by Spiers to chronicle how humans endlessly destroy and recreate the world, even as they witness nature’s resilience and sometimes magnificent indifference to their plans.

Spiers is an alchemist, who in every poem transmutes the prosaic into the profound, guiding the reader on journeys foreshadowed in the opening lines of “Wild Cucumber” — “leaving / I’ll walk left into morning glory / no shortcuts.”

The book’s cover, with art by Bolinas Frank, also forecasts the walkabouts and hard weather to come, in a lush illustration of the Northwest native wild cucumber (Marah oreganus) — an unruly and wildly spreading plant, of little use to humans, named after the Hebrew word for “bitter.”

And although Spiers does not look away from bitterness and grief in this collection, she also finds majesty, myth and transcendence in both the hollowed out and overgrown places where her subjects dwell.

Cape Disappointment

Mouth of the Columbia River

The yurt is in a circle, and it smells like mushrooms

fresh from the soil. Slats reinforce the canvas.

At the apex, its skylight is an eye, seeing cumulus

glide over, and shore pines take on the wind.

The yurt is my cocoon, and I barely a homunculus.

I am a soft entity, eating crackers, drinking water

from a plastic bottle. My thin skin is a loose cover

for fragile bones. I am cursed knowing the future,

that I will never bulk up to split the canvas casing

and emerge fully, a creature among diverse creatures.