New Ecopoetry Pleads for Our Broken yet Enduring Planet https://ift.tt/YClNMdg
Few books revolve around extinction while remaining inspirational. But Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura Gray-Street, strives to walk that razor’s edge. The collection highlights the connection between human bodies and ecology. It comes as a sequel to The Ecopoetry Anthology published by the same press and editors in 2013.
The word “anthropocene,” meaning today’s ecological epoch defined by human influences on the planet’s natural systems, haunts this new anthology like a hungry ghost. And indeed, the collection is scientific and literal, sometimes more of a manifesto than a revelation or provider of literary solace, both gorgeous and hideous. It’s a far cry from the whimsical verses of environmental poetry’s old guard, Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver, whose pristine landscapes brimmed with carefree animals.
Victoria Chang, for example, offers an obituary for the sea, while Ariana Benson’s haunting poem “Black Pastoral” juxtaposes lynching and environmental devastation, placing descriptions of violence against a Black boy beside a bloodied deer. A journey into the natural world is gruesome, these poets seem to be saying, and, given the context of the environmental crisis, the stakes in 2025 could not be higher.
Other poems in the collection make readers uncomfortable yet nostalgic. In Teresa Dzieglewicz’s “Baking Bread as Oceti Sakowin Is Raided,” the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline becomes a part of the poet’s body even as she helplessly bears witness via disembodied broadcasts:
Every day, I brush my teeth with Oceti,
Every day, I wash my clothes with Oceti,
Every day, it is Oceti that fills my glass.
On the feed, the soldiers are chasing Eric
who made tea for our coughs,
dipping into jars of marshmallow root
and ginger and osha.
At least a dozen poems touch on racial disparities and climate injustice, with the simplicity of Sarah Giragosian’s “Newtok, Alaska” ringing truest of all without preaching or navel-gazing:
There’s not much time left,
the elders tell us.
The river slurps at the edges
of our village, and we bury our hungers in work.
The U.S. government is both present and absent throughout the poem, a distant power without ears to hear pleas for help as exile becomes ever more expensive.
A few offer a cheeky take on post-apocalyptic narratives. CMarie Fuhrman’s “End Times” is one such poem, opening with:
it’s the last day of the earth
and I rise and feed my dogs, water
the Christmas cactus and spin off
the dying bloom. This, I am told, allows
for more blooms.
And, occasionally, a poem offers a flash of familiar delight in the natural world, like Maggie Graber’s “in which i notice the birds again.” When birds return to her garden, full of plants drinking light to make sugar, the poet quips “of course they do.” These poems keep the collection afloat despite all the heavy losses it holds.
The strongest poems in the collection cast plants and animals as protagonists in our man-made hell, using cinematic language that accentuates the beautiful gloom. For example, Ned Balbo’s “The Wolves of Chernobyl” transports readers to a forest drenched in rust-red radiation. “Wolves reclaim the land,” Balbo writes about the snowy forest with infinite birch trees, “and wolves endure.”
Several poems thick with warning strike true as an avalanche of arrows. “Few of us knew what the birdcalls meant/or what the fires were saying,” Marie Howe writes in “Postscript,” which goes on to say, “The air turned red. The ocean grew teeth.” Here there is the pleasure of a scathing accusation, a battle cry against willful ignorance or greed, delivered with eloquence and precision.
And the gritty accounts of living near gas drilling or construction come across as the most powerful of all. When Julia Spicher Kasdorf writes of her sons’ nosebleeds, stomach pain, rashes, and the gas company’s security assigned to shut her up as her family’s health deteriorates in “A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers the Public Health,” her use of colloquial language like “crick,” “dumb,” and “junk food” make the poem a horror story from a trusted friend full of salt and common sense.
Postmodern and experimental poems without obvious rhyme schemes or traditional musicality are the rule here. There is an almost exclusive focus on avant-garde layouts (an evocative stream-of-consciousness poem printed in the shape of California is a compelling example) and heavy-handed political free verse.
Some poems are aimlessly frustrated rather than passionate or self-aware of the poet’s own role in harming the environment — mere meditations on disorder and despair. However, this appears intentional, as the genre itself is fixated on the current ecological crisis in a way that sometimes makes classical art appear trite and pretentious. In short, the anthology is flawed because it is all true.
All things considered, however, Attached to the Living World offers a rich diversity of poems about the environment, about a planet depleted and enduring, broken but still eternal. It offers glimmers of chaos and darkness and bliss for readers who dare to confront them.
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