Just Wild Enough - by Heidi Barr (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What does it mean to be just wild enough?

This is a collection of poetry that explores wildness through the lens of the seasons, the elements, the four directions, and ultimately, through the mystery at the heart of it all. Author Heidi Barr invites a wander through one's own wildness, from finding songs in your pockets to befriending mossy logs to tuning your ears to ballads written by branches. Take a walk through words in this timeless collection and emerge more beautiful in your own creatureliness and more wonder-filled, than before.

Review Quotes

"In the lineage of Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, but with a resplendent eye and voice all her own, Heidi Barr's Just Wild Enough is a flowing meditation on the seasons that steps beyond the usual markers of the turning of the year. With a finely honed embodied attention, the poet guides us gracefully to places that hold an ever-present invitation to commune with the holy immanence of an enlivened Earth and the luminous insights that emerge when we do. C.G. Jung once said: 'People got dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch Nature, we get clean.' This is poetry that washes us clean."

-Frank Inzan Owen, author of The School of Soft-Attention

"Once again, Heidi Barr acts as guide to your inner and outer world. Exploring the directions and elements of each season, Just Wild Enough is a journey through the circle of a year, and a discovering of how to belong in this world. It asks, whether listening to bird songs, or hearing news of human injustice, are you wild enough to live life as a shared experience? You may lose yourself in the message of each poem. Yet, as in nature, it is in the quiet of this poetry where you remember what you really are."

-Esther Marcella Hoffman, author of Love Note to Gaia

"Reading Just Wild Enough puts us back into the flow of the seasons and reminds us of the restorative rhythm of life. Each verse holds the potential to enliven and reawaken us to the true nature of wildness. These words are written for the ones who love wild things as well as the ones who have been forgetting them."

-Catherine Brooks, Literary Apothecary, Curative Reading

"Barr speaks to us deeply as she follows the seasons and cardinal points in her new collection Just Wild Enough and the reader is enfolded into the light, sounds, and sensations of the natural world. Some poems feel as light and bright as morning dew, some roll in like a fog of presence, and some sing to the heart like wildflowers and birdsong. Such a gift invites us to slow down long enough to understand a life of wonder we might be missing and offers a celebration of what we can savor right now."

-Lisa Colón DeLay, author of Wild Land Within and host of Spark My Muse podcast

"Just Wild Enough conjures the best sort of longing in me-to walk in autumn woods or brew a cup of tea and watch the towhees from my favorite porch chair. Barr's poems are kind invitations into presence with the wildness waiting at our doorsteps and shimmering within us. She welcomes us into kinship with the natural world, coaxing us toward the gentle attentiveness required for living well."

-Krissy Kludt, poet and executive director of Writing the Wild