FROM A REVIEW OF
A WILDERNESS OF RICHES
...Names, as it turns out, and their place in history, can strike mystery in one’s imagination, a feeling of existential discovery shared by many of the voices in Lenny Lianne’s A Wilderness of Riches ... which recounts the Jamestown settlement in first-person narrative poems.
There is much to discover in the book, and if one does not remember much about the Jamestown settlement from elementary school, Lianne lends a hand with carefully documented details — settlers’ occupations, local flora and fauna – concerning the crossing. Her volume is broken into four sections: one from John Smith’s perspective, one from Pocahontas’ perspective, one from the perspective of potential brides shipped to the new world, and, finally, a section shaped by the landscape, both natural and political.
To say that the poems are a story would be too simple, but it is a narrative we know and have forgotten. The best poems in A Wilderness of Riches concern Pocahontas, the heroine of the narrative. And she is a fitting heroine, for she speaks for the native Powhatan Indians of the Algonquin tribe, for the land, as well as for the English, and her story sharpens the book’s subtext of marriage, and a woman’s place in the New World.
...
My favorite moment in her story is in “Vernacular of Night” when she lies
next to dull Thomas Rolfe (whom she views in “Before Marriage” as a “strange little man...who can neither hunt...or fashion...trinkets.”) and voices native words for plants and animals as her husband snores and dreams of tobacco. Pocahontas spends much time contemplating her names – her secret name and her new Christian name – and it is this understanding of the shades of a name, and therefore of identity, that gives the section its heart and brain. It is the same insight that allows her, in “Our Lodgings in London: Two Views,” to understand the irony of staying at the Belle Sauvage Inn, where she witnesses behavior of men who do not go far “without...dagger or drink,” and of women who seek rich men.
...
And Pocahontas remains a lonely figure, lost to both societies, and eventually
left coughing in the bitter damp cold of an English winter wishing she were home in the wild gathering tubers in “As I close my eyes against the Cold.” Her loss is our loss, and her loneliness is echoed in the third section of Lianne’s volume, the Brides for the Colony: Voices of the Early Immigrant Women, where the new brides’ individual experience is explored in the loose corona “Brides for the Colony.”
...
Lianne’s book is a fine addition to the history and lore of Jamestown.
...A Wilderness of Riches is an earnest and engaging work of reader friendly narrative poetry.
by Scott Whitaker
for The Broadkill Review

There is much to discover in the book, and if one does not remember much about the Jamestown settlement from elementary school, Lianne lends a hand with carefully documented details — settlers’ occupations, local flora and fauna – concerning the crossing. Her volume is broken into four sections: one from John Smith’s perspective, one from Pocahontas’ perspective, one from the perspective of potential brides shipped to the new world, and, finally, a section shaped by the landscape, both natural and political.
To say that the poems are a story would be too simple, but it is a narrative we know and have forgotten. The best poems in A Wilderness of Riches concern Pocahontas, the heroine of the narrative. And she is a fitting heroine, for she speaks for the native Powhatan Indians of the Algonquin tribe, for the land, as well as for the English, and her story sharpens the book’s subtext of marriage, and a woman’s place in the New World.
...
My favorite moment in her story is in “Vernacular of Night” when she lies
next to dull Thomas Rolfe (whom she views in “Before Marriage” as a “strange little man...who can neither hunt...or fashion...trinkets.”) and voices native words for plants and animals as her husband snores and dreams of tobacco. Pocahontas spends much time contemplating her names – her secret name and her new Christian name – and it is this understanding of the shades of a name, and therefore of identity, that gives the section its heart and brain. It is the same insight that allows her, in “Our Lodgings in London: Two Views,” to understand the irony of staying at the Belle Sauvage Inn, where she witnesses behavior of men who do not go far “without...dagger or drink,” and of women who seek rich men.
...
And Pocahontas remains a lonely figure, lost to both societies, and eventually
left coughing in the bitter damp cold of an English winter wishing she were home in the wild gathering tubers in “As I close my eyes against the Cold.” Her loss is our loss, and her loneliness is echoed in the third section of Lianne’s volume, the Brides for the Colony: Voices of the Early Immigrant Women, where the new brides’ individual experience is explored in the loose corona “Brides for the Colony.”
...
Lianne’s book is a fine addition to the history and lore of Jamestown.
...A Wilderness of Riches is an earnest and engaging work of reader friendly narrative poetry.
by Scott Whitaker
for The Broadkill Review

