IN PRAISE OF ESSENTIAL

What is Essential? Jenny Bates knows well and isn’t afraid to tell you with her unique and essential voice. Throughout this wonderful collection, Bates gives voice to those who walk, crawl, swim, and fly in the world with us, our essential partners and common souls. Her eyes report what so many of us miss how “Light mist beads /on a deep blue Sparrow,” how plants work beside us and within us (especially in her namesake poem “Creeping Jenny” and in “Drupe Venialis”).

These poems are passionate in no way distant or detached but engaged and embracing, celebrating. Bates and her poems are essential because “We are born of a mother that is not / dependent on us. // She is a planet - and a small, fragile / one at that.”

Be warned: “A touch dangerous as lightning, / purposeful as a stone placed / in a particular berth.”

Then touch this book, open it, read it. It is truly essential.

-Paul Jones, Something Wonderful

Essential blends what every human being knows: that instinct rules, as soul never dies, yet survives directions as Fox’s feet Jenny Bates settles effortlessly. To read the poems is to camp out among the stars of the universe and to appreciate the little and big creatures in forests of Memory’s imagination, for Jenny Bates is custodian of the earth’s spirit, that “silence between the beating of wings.”

- Shelby Stephenson was poet laureate of North Carolina from 2015-2018. His recent book is Country.

Jenny Bates has a well-developed sixth sense and she uses it to feel and observe the natural world. This is a volume by a poet who communicates with the natural world, not simply by listening, but by speaking back. I found evidence of true empathy with non-human creatures in these writings.

- Catherine Raven, author of Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship

“A captivating exploration of the human experience...an exquisite poetic journey that delves deep into the raw essence of existence, urging readers to reconnect with their primal selves with vivid imagery and untethered emotion…the poems explore the fragmented nature of the soul, yearning for unfiltered experiences that nourish and rejuvenate the spirit.”

- Roula-Maria Dib, PhD, Director, London Arts-Based Research Centre Founding Editor, Indelible; Creative Producer, Indelible Evenings and
Psychreative IAJS, Board of Directors (member)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Opening Doors: an equilog of poetry about Donkeys

Coyote With Coffee

Visitations

Slip

Where the Deer Sleep

BIO

Jenny Bates, member Winston-Salem Writers,NC Poetry Society, NC Writers Network. She has five books, Opening Doors: an equilog of poetry about Donkeys, Coyote with Coffee purchased by Vanderbilt and the University of Vermont. Visitations, Slip, and Where the Deer Sleep.Published in numerous journals including NCPS’ Pinesong and W-S Writers Flying South. Also a decade long poet for PIPS. On the 100th Anniversary of WWI, she was asked to help launch poetry dedicated to the history and contributions of Donkeys and Mules during WWI. These poems are now archived for the Animals in War memorial in London. In 2023 she was accepted as a presenter in Kew Gardens, London for the Ecopoetics and Environmental Aesthetics Conference presented by the London Arts-Based Research Centre.