POETRY AND HEALING

The Roaring (and Singing) Inside Her: Appreciating Susan Griffin

by David Shaddock

We look to poetry to illuminate issues relevant to health, mental health, and coping with our lives today.

I CALL MY COLUMN "Poetry and Healing" because I turn to poetry for witness, balm, direction. As I set out to write a celebration of the work of Susan Griffin (1943-2025), I found, not surprisingly, that her work is a source for all three. That we are a part, not apart from nature, that women are a part, not apart from humanity—It is shocking to see the current reactionary regime shred these hard-won, and, we thought, well-established, truths. As we witness the reversal of progress, we'd almost come to take for granted, it is helpful to take a step back and appreciate the fact that such progress got established in the first place. In today's column I remember Susan Griffin, who died in September. Her passionate and lyrical writing contributed to the eco-feminist paradigm shift currently under brutal attack.

Don't guess

don't guess at my

passion

a wholly wild and raging

love for this world

Griffin writes in her poem "Prayer for Continuation." She writes as if she were revealing a shameful secret. That the love for our bodies—and a love for the material world they are part of—is lowly, shameful, despicable is the patriarchal paradigm all of Griffin's work is pitched against. But the way to oppose it is not, or not just, anger and denunciation. It is through a poetry of love and celebration. She does not oppose the dualism that places women and nature beneath God and man with a counter-dualism. Instead, she embraces it, occupies it, learns it's nature. She writes, in a section from the same poem that bears a heading "the enemy":

Your goodness was like an island.

(Your sainthood was the sin.)

Now that you have fallen

I cross the water

wrestle with you

charge you to bless me

watch as you

appear and disappear

become me

Restating this theme, she writes in a later section:

Do you think it is right

to despair?

No, no, it is not about

right and wrong.

It is the thread

shining.

If I were younger, I'd be tempted to head to a local parlor and have these words tattooed on my arm.

Although this is a poetry column, I turn now to Griffin's seminal book Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. I am emboldened to include this book by our mutual friend Donna Brookman's suggestion to view this work as a long, lyrical, mixed-media poem. Consider this passage from "Matter, How We Know," her concluding chapter:

Because we know ourselves to be made from this earth. See this grass. The patches of silver and brown. Worn by the wind. The grass reflecting all that lives in the soil. The light. The grass needing the soil. With roots deep in the earth. And patches of silver. Like the patches of silver in our hair. Worn by time. This bird flying low over the grass. Over the tules. The cattails, sedges, rushes, reeds, over the marsh. Because we know ourselves to be made from this earth.

The short, fragmentary sentences could be lines of a poem. They accumulate like the lists in Whitman, an obvious and salutary influence. How we know. How we know we know. What we are allowed to know and what we are not allowed to know. This groundbreaking work is a critique of patriarchal epistemology. And a love poem to the world that flows in when we undam it.

Great poems move by accretion. A piling up of sounds and pictures. But they move as well by the blurring of the boundary between logic and intuition. Susan would argue that this is a feminine space, that Adam gave names to the animals, while Eve fell in love with the snake. Hopkins shines over this poem, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." And Blake too, Urizen, with his patriarchal beard, dividing up the world with calipers. But Women and Nature goes beyond critique. It is a work of mythopoeia. An epic, telling, or retelling, of our history. Like Dante fixing forever the human, poetic imagination as the site of our salvation. Or Milton, sacralizing his internal dialogue.

Women and Nature is a collage, a paste up. Old forestry manuals, timelines, philosophical treatises, scraps of poetry. Never strident or rhetorical, the argument builds, the author sure of herself, sure of her artistic hand. It tells a story, like all epics, the story of our human race, a story in four parts which she names Matter, Separation, Passage, and Her Vision, the Separate Rejoined. A story of fall and redemption. In his epic poem Jerusalem, Blake writes that "Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven and Earth." But now "The starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion." Blake's poem sets out to reassemble this dismembered body. Right here, right now, he famously asserts, in England's "green and golden land." (I am indebted to Tobias Churton for this reading of Blake.)

Operating in this epic/prophetic tradition, Women and Nature sets out to reassemble the archetypal, and physical, female body. A body that is vast as space itself, where nothing is ever still and motion always changes shape. Where Space [is] electrified by her feelings. Where she makes out the invisible, where she touches the real.

Never out of print in the almost fifty years, Griffin's linking environmental degradation and the exploitation of women is still radically simple. And paradigm-shifting. Here is the ending of Women and Nature, where Griffin seamlessly mixes the lyrical and the prophetic:

…all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, the tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us.

Yasher Koach, may your strength be firm, congregants shout after a Torah reading. Yasher Koach, dear Susan, may your words outlive your physical life, and may they remind us that, in a less visible dimension, poets have, and will continue to change history.

David Shaddock PhD is a poet and psychotherapist. His new poetry collection is Tehachapi Pass; his previous poetry book is A Book of Splendor: New and Selected Poems on Spiritual Themes. He is also the author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field, from Routledge, and two books on relationships and couples therapy. He lectures widely on those topics, and maintains a private practice in Berkeley.

— posted February 2026