Wind and Hills

by Marguerite Costigan

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The poems in this collection by lifelong poet and painter Marguerite Costigan are based on emotional and visceral responses to nature and culture. “It is fresh and original in voice and phrasing and in its close and resonant attention to the detail of our environment it preserves and cherishes. Most importantly, these poems offer a transformation of the world, a vision of our lives as they are connected to the light, the wind and hills, to a winning and metaphysical hope.” (Christopher Buckley)

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-35-8 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2024943217

Released August 20, 2024  |  Copyright 2024

112 pages

Author Biography

Marguerite Costigan is a professional artist, naturalist, and life-long poet. She began writing poetry as a child on her artist-father’s farm in rural Pennsylvania. In high school, her work was included in a national poetry anthology. A 44-year transplant to California, her poems embrace multiple themes: the human condition, the environment, war and love. Her work has appeared in Blood and Thunder, Café Solo, Asylum, the anthology Poems for Endangered Places, and the international journal Le Fenetre. She has taught with the California State Poets in the Schools program, has been reading her work live before Central Coast audiences since the 1970s, and was proclaimed San Luis Obispo County Poet Laureate 2015 and 2016 by the Board of Supervisors. Two of Marguerite’s poetry collections have been published: Rock & Fire and War & Whispers. Marguerite lives in San Luis Obispo with her musician/writer husband and two plump cats.

Endorsements

“Here is a poet who reads our hearts and our dreams. She walks with the Spirit of the Universe, who sings to her: ‘ . . . my heart is still drinking from flung wings . . . ’ Costigan is a Seer, a Seeker, a Poet who reports back to us in the rhythm of our heartbeats. I am so grateful that this poet has gathered these poems for us. We have been listening with awe for over forty-five tumultuous, terrifying, chaotic years to Costigan, who brings us home to beauty.” 
—Dr. Lani Steele, award-winning poet, longtime educator, and devoted traveler

“Marguerite Costigan's poems often crack the day open like an egg. Now, in Wind and Hills she weaves a blanket out of the fibers of the natural world.”
—Benjamin Daniel Lawless, publisher, Penciled In Press

“Much nature poetry, for all its virtues, does not rise beyond careful description, naming, listing . . . but Marguerite Costigan’s Wind and Hills, in a modest and yet spectacular way, reaches far beyond this. It is fresh and original in voice and phrasing and in its close and resonant attention to the detail of our environment it preserves and cherishes. Most importantly, these poems offer a transformation of the world, a vision of our lives as they are connected to the light, the wind and hills, to a winning and metaphysical hope.”
—Christopher Buckley, novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, and magazine editor

“Artist-poet Marguerite Costigan is a long-lived dweller on and in land once Northern Chumash and miles north Salinan. Wide open she is to our environment, other scapes, nonhuman residents, and shapemakers. Porous her skin and aura for the beauty of landscape to cascade inwardly. The experience swells as an anxious, overwhelming ache of wondrous beauty barely tolerable. In these moments that what absorbed returns through her porous words, words leaking back from what received into the reader. Should the reader be open, be in union, the shared beauty becomes a tidal experience of overwhelming waves caused by a rare, deep knowing. From any of these wave building poems a droplet may be seen as a line in a poem, minimal like haiku. The variety of droplet lines, couplets, and stanzas to be held to the gem-piercing sun are formed by the seeing of her painter eye and the hearing of her poet ear, the poetry in her poetry. These poems record a dive into landscape and inhabitants out of which, from inside out, sing and chant messages heard from the elements, nonhumans, and their spirit guides. I can say without blushing or hyperbole, Costigan is a poetry daughter of the Pole Star of Big Sur poetry to our north, Robertson Jeffers. I also claim she does a deeper dive. Among Indigenous North American ways there is a phrase: ‘When in Beauty beautiful things happen.’ After holding and reading this collection the poems remain resonating in the mind and if open enough in the body cells calling forth protective action in this moment of ours.”
—Karl Kempton, poet

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