Sonntag, “The Tree at the Center” (Reviewed by Rebecca Bateman)

Author: Kathryn Knight Sonntag
Title: The Tree at the Center
BCC Press, 2020. 96 pages. Poetry collection.

Reviewed by Rebecca Bateman. August 2020.

Kathryn Sonntag’s poetry is an exquisite dichotomy. Erudite and intuitive. Grandiose and intimate. Powerful and bereaving. She leads us from inside the womb to the Holiest place and we find they are the same.

In a world sorely missing a divine feminine, we catch glimpses that She is there, waiting to be delivered; waiting to deliver. To find Her, we need only to recognize Her. Someone, show us how. Sonntag was made to do this.

With gifted hand, Sonntag has taken her knowledge and experience—her clay—and formed the words that allow for us to watch the female image appear. Her spiritual creation allows us to seek the physical embodied One:

you must ask for what you really want

I had several favorites in this collection—many dog-eared pages; many made me pause, reflect, and reread—Salvation Pantoum, Woman of Willendorf, Cube of Fire, Ezekiel’s Visions, and The Grove are standouts, but Renascence stopped my heart:


I birth my own body,
unspool,
hand back the rib.

I dream of woman-made
woman, of which
man-made woman cannot conceive.
I birth my own

name from the end of a cord
still pulsing under
eternal, multifloras boughs,
break sac, emerge,
effulgent and ravenous
for a mother-tongue and a mother-land—

Next to me a lion and a lamb
purr in the grass. Every forest is green
and rising,
rising.

Piercing. Profound. Powerful.

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