The title of this collection of poems, “Things As It Is,” by Chase Twichell, whose connection to the Adirondacks goes back generations, may seem like a grammatical error. But the title is taken from a phrase from an interview with Zen monk and teacher Suzuki Roshi, who assured the interviewer that that is exactly what he meant. These poems, in part, echo that phrase in that they explore how things transcend their individual selves, how even the self is both the many things of its development, and the singular self created from all that it’s taken in.

I think of what physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote: that “things” are nothing more than long events, that even a stone is a very slow event of cohering and disintegrating. Even a human life is an event that takes a lifetime to occur.

The collection contains five loosely connected sections. The first addresses experiences of childhood, another are elegies for the author’s mother. One considers the diminishing Earth. And the other two seem particularly steeped in the author’s Buddhist studies and her close attention to the world. What connects the sections is this idea of things becoming, of change. Twichell writes, “Every moment’s a splitting twig…”

In “Graveyard of Imaginary Selves,” from the first section of the collection, Twichell writes “Here lies that one-year-old, / along with all the little shucked-off / waifs and animals I played, / my eyes their eyes…”

From the section called Earth Without Humans, the poem “The Background” observes: “The sky glitters with garbage and cargo.” From “What the Trees Said” are these two thoughts: “Soon snow will come to bandage / the whole wounded world….I asked the trees / if they would be our witness, / but the trees said no.”

The author’s mother is a lively presence in the poems of her. This from “Babylon at Stonehenge”: “Mom calls Stone Ridge, her retirement community / Stonehenge.” After a seizure, she says, “I’m in the Floatisphere….”

But it’s the poems of the section called Roadkill that speak to me most. These are mostly brief, nature focused poems of close observation, with that deep focus that ancient Asian poems often have. From “Fox Bones” is this moment: “A jawbone stuck out of the dirt– / young fox with still-perfect teeth…Everything is made of mystery. / And then it disappears.”

Here in its entirety is a poem that seems to embody the entire collection: “Path of Red Leaves” (the word kensh in the poem means, basically, an essential insight):

I stop on a footbridge in the old woods,

and look down into the turbulent

gleam of a waterfall’s

disappearance into the next pool,

and the gleam of its never leaving.

I’ve been strolling on a path of red leave

waiting for a kensh or a trophy,

for someone to call my name.

Instead, the brook’s cold, secret sparks

ask me if I’m immortal, too.

Twichell has authored many books of poems, and this most recent continues her pattern of both self-awareness and a deep entanglement with the world, particularly and specifically the world of nature and animals.