So Much Depends on the Light

by Susan Coultrap-McQuin

In the tradition of nature poets like Mary Oliver, Susan Coultrap-McQuin pays close attention to the land around her, especially to what she finds in her own Minnesota backyard: a prairie of wildflowers, a hillside of oaks, and a pond that reflects the sky. In this landscape, she watches monarchs and bumblebees, nuthatches and hawks, turtles and foxes, as well as her grandchildren’s play, and all these make their way into her poems. Filled with vivid imagery and engaging metaphors, her poems invite readers’ own reflections on nature and the seasons of life, on grief and delight, on those we love and on those we will leave behind. Many poems convey feelings of awe and reverence in response to nature’s beauty and mystery. They express a spirit of gratitude and peace. Above all, these poems give special meaning to the importance of place—the place we choose for living our life and for leaving our legacy.

Early Praise

In Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s beautiful new book, So Much Depends on the Light, we spend time with a narrator who takes us through the gardens and hiking trails of her life. Coultrap-McQuin has an unfailing sense of the right detail, the right word, and often makes excellent use of the title to convey her delight with the natural world. She likes to write concrete poems using shape as a visual clue in poems about trees, butterfly wings, and hummingbirds hovering.  Her poems are compact; her language concise, and she knows how to leave something for the reader.  In one of my favorite poems in the collection, “If I Could Meet Mary Oliver,” the speaker says I would meet her in October / at the edge of the woods. / We would stand in the field / admiring the goldenrod. I love seeing the world through Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s generous and hopeful eyes.

—JOYCE SUTPHEN, Minnesota Poet Laureate, 2011-2021, author of Carrying Water to the Field

This moment calls you, writes Susan Coultrap-McQuin. Whether this call is from the lilacs, or a grey Buddha of a toad, or a pond nearby that begins to hum, it’s always from an expansive sense of time on the American prairie. Here is a poet who might also be naturalist, illustrator, spiritual advisor; with vivid specifics, charm, and reverence, she lures the reader into savoring “the rhythms of a life.” Yes, the Midwestern snow lingers, but these poems reveal many seasons’ wisdom, “the parenthetic of the warm blue sky,” and ultimately a call to the resilience we learn from nature.

—KORY WELLS, author of Sugar Fix

Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s So Much Depends on the Light features poems of exquisite tenderness and attention to nature and humanity’s role in it. Coultrap-McQuin’s speaker is a lyric tracker, studying the cold crackled trees and the lusty bees, delivering to us the richness of the various settings the poems encounter—prairie, woods, frozen lake. These poems situate earth as our cherished inheritance and deep responsibility—calling us to be, again and again, “beguiled by surprise.

—AMIE WHITTEMORE, author of Nest of Matches

So Much Depends on the Light is poetry alive with the natural world, full of the rhythms of the seasons. It is a meditation of language that is sometimes quiet, sometimes melodious, a witness to joy and sometimes sorrow, always with a keen eye, always insightful. Be prepared to bask in the gentle beauty of the earth, take in the wind over the prairie, sip the nectar of the monarch, and exult in the rich pollen of Susan’s pen. My heart is full of light in this wonderful collection.

—ELLEN LAGER, author of When a Tree Falls

So Much Depends on the Light is a chance to immerse yourself in the wonders of the prairie. Susan Coultrap-McQuin invites readers to pause, listen and observe, with a chance to nurture, tend and let go.  Like Scheherazade, Susan tells tales of the prairie with grace and panache. And we, beguiled by surprise, learn what nature has to offer and like church bells we ring with contentment. She scatters pollen with her pen until our senses bloom like flowers.  Susan knows the land and what is in it and honors that by this tribute. Her poem, “Like a Mother” reminds us that the scent of soil soothes.  She helps us fall in love with nature, shares joy, amazement and grief in her gentle observations.

—ANNETTE GAGLIARDI, author of Benevolence, Poet Laureate, League of Minnesota Poets

 

About the Author

Susan Coultrap-McQuin is a retired educator and nature lover. From a very young age, she has had her hands in the soil of gardens and her eyes on natural wonders. It was probably inevitable that, when she retired and started writing poetry over ten years ago, she would first be inspired by the wild prairie, flowers, trees, and pond of her own backyard and neighborhood in Minnesota. She loves to wander woods and fields, both at home and abroad; if you invite her to an arboretum or botanical garden, she will always say “yes.”

Susan grew up in a Chicago suburb and earned degrees at Iowa State and the U of Iowa.  She was a professor and administrator at universities in Minnesota and New York and has served on a variety of regional and national boards. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and she has a chapbook of her travel poems, entitled What We Bring Home (The Poetry Box, 2021). Among her honors is a Pushcart nomination. Susan is married with two grown children and four grandchildren, who join her in tending gardens and naming wildflowers and pollinators in her yard.

 

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