Blue Grama
Wild Sage Press / 10 September 2014

Blue Grama by Heather Peat Hamm Published by Wild Sage Press Review by Justin Dittrick ISBN 978-0-988 1229-6-3 $18.00 Heather Peat Hamm’s collection of poems, songs, and illustrations, Blue Grama, offers readers a rich field study in monographic perspective, demonstrating this ecological poet’s masterful command of detail and description that holds the prairies in their clearest, most vivid light. No aspect of prairie fields, or people who call the prairie land their home, is too small or too hidden, to attract this poet’s perspicacious eye. These are poems not just to read, but to assimilate with care, as one assimilates the defining characteristics revealed in a botanist’s handbook. The poem’s are a celebration of a distinct livelihood—one that is seldom presented with such joie de vivre. The collection’s greatest triumph might be that it metaphorically couples the hardships, pathos, joys, and raptures experienced by the land’s people with penetrating insight into that which perseveres among them, the creatures and plants that share the conditions of life, wondrously unique, yet familiar, in their adaptive movements. The people and the land become intertwined as one reads the poems and studies the drawings painstakingly sketched and labelled by a deft poet-scientist. Like the…