Reviewed by Carolyn Martin
Keeping It All Afloat by Ingrid Wendt
Moonpath Press, 2026, 58 pages, $16.99
ISBN 978-1-970256-10-9
Available at https://www.moonpathpress.com/IngridWendt.htm
and through local independent booksellers.
The American poet Galway Kinnell once described poetry as “somebody standing up and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” That “somebody’ could easily describe Ingrid Wendt’s musical poems (grown out of several periods of residence in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula) which swing between laughter, wonder, joy, grief, and despair.
Chronicling the idiosyncrasies and under-celebrated creatures of sea, land, and air; fusing reverence with comic relief, and delight with self-deprecation, Wendt’s poems increasingly bear witness to what humans do to each other and to the world. They grieve habitat loss, climate chaos, environmental degradation, social injustice, and cultural erasure, all fueled by first-world hubris, the poet’s own included
For example, in “Ode to the Great-Tailed Crackle,” she playfully addresses this bird as a Rowdy Castanet whose song sounds like a Rusty hinge, Old Squeaky Door, Dishes Crashing to the Floor. Immediately, we realize we are in the presence of a poet who is the master of auditory as well as visual imagery. She not only invites us to experience the birds, fish, and trees she’s grown to love, but to delight in language that often takes us far beyond the physical.
In “Awakened Too Early, I Consider the Nature of Beauty,” she uses the tropical mockingbird as a metaphor for an essential paradox of life on earth.
Cruel
bird, whose California cousin I once watched
peck to death a nest of newly-hatched mourning doves,
then skedaddle. How
can a bird with the voices of cherubim
be so horrible?
The poem offers a painful truth: Beauty and goodness are not always on the same team.
Later, in “Prayer,” a poem that references the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Wendt echoes a similar paradox:
Water, great giver and taker, help me to remember
How to cradle wonder and still bear witness to horror and grief.
How to let protest and beauty share the same beats of the heart…
Giver/taker. wonder/horror, protest/beauty: with these pairings, the poet takes readers beyond her circumscribed world to examine other corners of life on earth at this moment, moments that are filled with awe and grief. In the process, she invites them to be on the same team with the whole of creation, just as she is.
Moving from birds and trees to snorkeling with tropical fish, Wendt captures the mysteries of the underwater world which she calls Eden under the sea (“A Valentine for Akumal”). Anyone who has ever snorkeled will easily identify with the poet who explains in “Pot of Gold”: Bewitched, each day I hang, transfixed….//letting me hold myself, time, and the rest of the world/stock still.
In this stock-still world sounds are muted and watchfulness becomes the major mode of observation. For example, when the poet comes face-to-face with a colorful Rainbow Parrotfish, she describes the encounter in her typically breathtaking language:
…clown-sized lips and eyelids the brightest possible
aqua blue in an orange-gold face,
the way a child might rub its mother’s most
dramatic eye shadow onto the most unlikely places…
Then she wonders if she is the watcher or the watched. The answer is most likely both since Keeping It All Afloat is filled with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “reciprocity.” Wendt’s love affair with Nature helps to keep her afloat, and she repays that gift by memorializing Nature’s bounty in these poems.
Readers will want to read and reread this collection for its lush descriptions of tropical landscapes, its insights into human nature and the state of the world, and its stunning use of language that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. This book will keep their curiosity and imaginations buoyant as they ponder what Wendt says at the end of the title poem:
And someday soon, instead of
relentless grief at what the world has become, her business
will be––back home among you––to scout out every last
high speed antic and steadfast miracle still remaining
throughout the vast landscapes around us….
Keeping It All Afloat is an engaging and satisfying journey from being flown by wonder (“What They Saw…”) through bearing witness to what humans do to the world and to each other, toward a resolve to celebrate every steadfast miracle still remaining, with a poet/tour guide who has mastered the art of staying afloat despite life’s irreconcilable truths.
<div class=”highlight-box“>Reviewer Bio: Carolyn Martin is a recovering work addict who’s adopted the Spanish proverb, “It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards,” as her daily mantra. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications around the world. Her sixth collection, Splitting Open the World, was published in March 2025 by The Poetry Box, and her third chapbook, Metrophobia, by Lingua Ink Press in August 2025. For more: see www.carolynmartinpoet.com.</div>