Book Review: Camille LeFevre’s Sandstone and Kin

In her debut collection, ‘Sandstone and Kin’, Camille LeFevre creatively explores the natural landscape of Northern Arizona, presenting an intimacy with the land and dissolving the boundaries between nature and humanity. 

The collection was selected for publication from FLP’s New Womens’ Voices Chapbook Contest and it is definitely deserving of this achievement. LeFevre’s depiction of several kinds of ‘kin’ across her poetry adds to the vivid presentation of the speaker’s sense of self and life experiences. In only the first poem, ‘The Weight of the Moon’, LeFevre mentions a father, a mother, the moon, the northern sea, the dusk, desert plateau, sandstone, cliffs and canyons – elements that collectively form ‘home’. 

LeFevre crafts her poetry in a uniquely personal way and this is felt throughout the collection. The inventive use of form to create movement across the text and enact the poem’s meaning is something that I was especially drawn to. We see this across a number of poems and a striking example is “Desert Chimeras”, in which she writes:

Exhaustion inhales dawn

through my bedroom window

wakening sleep tired from heat 

melting asphalt into shimmer 

on the street 

      I walk stilling 

sense and sight

comes coyote – 

such a beautiful dog – 

The fragmented structure highlights the often-surprising nature of encounters with wildlife. Here, it appears that the exhausted speaker is dazed and perhaps even stunned by this experience, highlighting humanity’s complicated relationship with the natural world as we exist both outside and inside nature.

‘Migrations’

I will leave your hands empty

resuming course toward 

those magnetic peaks

in rescue of myself.

I particularly like the different natural identities that the sandstone rock takes on across this collection. In different poems, we see the rock depicted in many different ways, compared to an animal in “The Stone Whales” and then figured as like the inside of a fruit in “Under the Apricot Tree”: 

‘Do you see them? 

The stone whales 

breaching out of bedrock
nibbling at the sun’ (The Stone Whales)

‘My teeth 

split flesh sweet is the pulp 

of terroir: desert heat 

and sandstone.’ (Under the Apricot Tree)

Drawing on the common themes across ecopoetry, LeFevre directs readers to fellow ecopoets through the different quotes used to preface each section. Among them is an American ecopoet I particularly admire. Anne Haven McDonnell, author of ‘Living With Wolves’, ‘Breath on a Coal’, and ‘Singing Under Snow’ is quoted as the preface to Section III of the collection:

‘You finger the stone, its wave-worn 

surface, its weight—the story

you carry has made you

another animal. ‘

― Anne Haven McDonnell 

This quotation adds to LeFevre’s depiction of the blurred boundaries between humanity and nature and sets the tone for her exploration of this in the poems that follow:

‘our bodies –

mountainous, rocky, 

cleft, spired, mounded,

branching, shedding –

creek-cooled, sunbaked, 

lava-pitted, bony –

feathered, scaled,

furred, barked – of tooth, 

beak, skin, leaf, claw, 

eye, wing, paw –

do not dissolve

but other boundaries do’ (unveiling)

McDonnell wrote of this collection: “Here are poems of yearning and healing, of blurring body and land, of devotion and love to the red rock desert and her creatures. Camille LeFevre’s poetry collection Sandstone and Kin is a homecoming.” This couldn’t be a more accurate depiction of the collection as I found myself immersed in the thoughtfully crafted imagery, metaphors and symbols that encapsulate Northern Arizona through LeFevre’s eyes. As with all great ecopoetry, the reader hopes for a clear sense of the atmosphere and life of the environment that the poet focuses on. I strongly feel that LeFevre’s work accomplishes this as I felt myself transported to the desert landscapes she depicts. 

Overall, Sandstone and Kin is a moving and engaging poetry collection that provides a unique personal perspective on the landscapes the speaker encounters. After reading LeFevre’s collection, I find myself eager to explore more ecopoetry focusing on American desert landscapes.