The Wild Iris- Sara Conti

Recently, I have just started my journey within literature outside of my education. I find myself consuming information through videos and documentary’s, I would certainly consider myself a visual person. The genre of books I often find myself reading is fictional stories about darker topics and possibly dystopian. I would say a book I enjoyed recently was “The House We Grew Up In” by Lisa Jewell. 

I recently took a poetry class, and one of the pieces we were directed to read was The Wild Iris. This is a collection of poems that I was able to dissect and analyze. I thought it was interesting to take a deeper look into the perspectives and raw emotions of the poet. The author surrounds the collection around a year and within her garden. She uses her titles to tell this pattern of months, and the emotions she deals with throughout this timeline. The author also uses specific flowers to reflect the months and seasons she’s experiencing. I found this collection to stick with me, how one deals with change and coming to understanding these emotions. Although the overall feel was a range of melancholy, the authors interchanging emotions were what was attractive to me. One poem specifically stood out to me was Retreating Wind. In the first lines, “ When I made you, I loved you. Now I pity you.” the poet claims that she gives these flowers her all, the support, love, and necessities to bloom. Yet, she feels bad for them as they will come and go like the birds, meaning only seasonal. These flowers in her garden have a start and end, this could be interpreted as similar to a humans life, we begin flourish and then leave similar to this wind. I will continue my journey within non-fiction, and am excited to experience new literature.