To Speak to Each Day in Its Own Language
by Melissa Huff
50 Poems ~ 91 pages
Price: $20.00
Cover Design by Shay Culligan
Cover art “Sightings” by Melissa Huff
Author photo by Sarah Lincoln
Publisher: Kelsay Books
ISBN #: 978-1-63980-833-5
To Order: Amazon.com or Kelsaybooks.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
In July of 2026, I will reach the upper limits of my seventh decade. I find myself musing over this thought: What will I do with my limited time today? Indeed, what will I do with the limited time I have left in life? How shall I speak to this day in a language befitting its worth? In his timeless poem, ”Sunday Morning,“ Wallace Stevens’s protagonist contemplates a perceived tension between religious orthodoxy and the satisfactions offered by the natural world. He writes:
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
Similarly, Melissa Huff’s exquisite new book, To Speak to Each Day in Its Own Language, reveals her passion for a relationship with the natural world. There is an ongoing dialogue; a poetic relationship is in play. As poet Cristina Norcross has written, “Huff creates garlands of meaning with beautiful imagery and a deep reverence for nature.”
To Speak to Each Day is structured into four divisions: I. Talking with Trees; II. Threshold; III. Inhaling Light; and IV. The Calm Embedded in Forward Motion. Stylistically, Huff is full of delightful surprises. I counted more than a dozen variations of indentations, punctuation, italics usage, rhyme, and lineage. Her style coupled with a supersensitive awareness of her surroundings gives voice to a powerful merger between nature and human experience.
“Honeysuckle” is the lead poem and anchors the whole. In this vividly imagistic poem, Huff returns to early childhood. I get a whiff of aroma in the honeysuckle’s fragrant perfume. I can see her as she “wedges one sneaker / against rough bark” of her favorite “climbing tree.” She and her friend Kim weave yellow and white leaves together making garlands out of them. She muses, “Did I know then / that I would try to intertwine / life’s found materials / with strands of curiosity / that I might create / garlands of meaning?”
“Talking with Trees,” the section’s title poem, reveals the nature-spirit merger alluded to above:
In the after-snowfall silence I listen
to the bare trees of winter,
lean in to hear their wisdom whisper–
this is the best time
to scan the patterns of your growth,
decide which branches need pruning,
which offshoots are heading
in the wrong direction.
The poem continues …
In the spring,
I will ask these trees how
to stretch my arms wide,
hold myself up to the sky,
allow the furled layers of my heart
to unfold like leaves–
I’m captured by Huff’s simplicity of diction. No word is wasted. Her accessibility is remarkable. She wraps her arm around my shoulder in the most natural way, as if to say, Come, step into my world.
And what a world this poet occupies! “Aubade” (from Threshold) describes Huff’s quiet, interaction with a half-moon evening: “a quiet observer on a backdrop of blue / I, too, make no sound / as the warm breeze skims by cheek / ruffles the tufted crest / of a nearby cardinal’s cocked head / the birds have long since begun / their conversations … their language is not mine / nor do I have wings to help me catch / a column of air / nor hollow bones to render me / almost weightless”
For those unfamiliar, the word Aubade refers to music or poetry about dawn or to that twilight seam of time just before full light. This is an intense moment of pathos, felt by one who seeks “to claim the whole wide sky / as my terrain”
At the beginning of this review, I noted lines by Wallace Stevens, whose protagonist feels at one with the world conceived as “passions of rain, or moods in falling snow, and unsubdued elations when the forest blooms.” I get an intense sense of this in Huff’s poetry. She is no stranger to “Grievings in loneliness … feeling all pleasures and all pains.”
The poem “Wick” addresses such elusive feelings. It speaks of everything slumping within her, “like a wilting hydrangea / in ninety degree heat.” Her whole self “curls inward / like the leaves of a parched dogwood.” As the poem continues the poet knows she must look within to grant herself a “blade of self-kindness.” In meditation she fills the emptiness from “deadwood brown / to a more vibrant hue.” Her life-candle, her “wick“ will emerge triumphant once again.
I was breathless by the time I closed the last page of To Speak to Each Day in Its Own Language, I felt reborn … I felt as one might feel when the soul’s kindred spirit has been found.
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