Poetry for the Senses: Pulsing Elements

The poems in Jennifer Martin’s Pulsing Elements are written simply, but they are far from simple either in thought or execution. In what could serve as an epigraph for the collection, Martin writes: Search for the simple truth Without the gloss of literary concepts And you will be amazed And amazed we are. One of the best things about these poems is their freedom from just such extraneous gloss, allowing their simple yet provoking depth to shine through. Martin seeks the “simple truth” through a reflection on the four classical elements named by the Greek philosopher Empedocles as Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water. Her purpose, she states, is to “tug at the very soul of our existence,” but by this she means to tug at the elemental aspects of the human spirit, those emotions that connect us to the natural world rather than separate us from it. Martin’s poems acknowledge both destruction and creation and, when read slowly, reveal greater depths than their surface simplicity at first suggest. Her truth is indeed simple, but it is one that has struck the best minds from the beginning: that creation and destruction can coexist within the same things—earth, wind, water, fire. While not a new truth, it is worth revisiting, and in calling attention to it, Martin would have us be struck too. Ellen Tanner Marsh, New York Times Bestselling Author