Amanda Jernigan’s debut poetry collection forwards a critique of contemporary aesthetics and knowledge production. From archaeological excavations in modern-day Tunisia to a stop in the Garden of Eden (en route to the islands of Homer’s Odyssey), Jernigan’s intellectual scope is informed by an imperative to rechart humanity’s relationship to nature, along the way refuting the false claim that reality exists only when processed by human consciousness.

The poems critique the humanistic point of view, offering instead a consideration of what a pre-human, mythopoetic world might look like. While the book is likely to touch the hearts of Greek myth enthusiasts (it is in part an exercise in reading myths), it also forays into a complex examination of language and place as critical categories for understanding life.

The poem “The Night Guard” lays out the primary relation nature has to itself, a relation that precedes humans: “I watch the stars draw in / like eyes.” In “The Fieldworker,” the sky becomes a gong, “struck by the sun each hour” until nightfall, when the speaker “will nurse [her] Tuareg tea.” The poet displays a need to keep moving, to catch up with the earth as it shifts and signals change or even apocalypse. This poem resonates in an era when natural disasters seem to have become the order of the day. 

To what degree can the intellect respond to this order in a meaningful way? In “The Scholar,” Jernigan writes: “The books and maps, whatever is to hand, / will help, but in the end I must project / this ruin.” While her interest seems primarily in dealing with ruins – both their discovery and decline – there is a larger harmonic vision at work. The poem “Lowly” uncloaks the poet’s almost Wordsworthian praise of nature: viewed through its prism, each of Groundwork’s poems suddenly emerges as a unique hymn running from the earliest myths right up to the present.

Jernigan’s poems exalt nature without requiring a retreat into self-aggrandizing prophecies; as the title suggests, the poems stoop down to observe the world from the ground level. Groundwork is a metaphorical conch shell, given to us that we may better hear the sea.