Three new poetry releases haunted by humankind
An upright wonder (but one with wreckage in its wake), humankind haunts the poems of West Coast poets Kim Trainor, Robert Bringhurst and Jen Currin.
Collectively, the authors' ambivalent portrait of the globe's dominant species — anxious and reckless; vulnerable, plodding, and short-sighted — spurs on a reader to look about and reflect, and to wonder with apprehension about the impending future.
In her foreword, Trainor notes that A Thin Fire Runs Through Me began “involuntarily, as a way of writing my way through a difficult time.” She was dogged by political and environmental headlines, not to mention heartbreak and depression. Drawing inspiration from old (an ancient Chinese divination text) and new (“minutiae — tweets, Instagrams, texts, social media posts, online news”), Trainor's spare, incisive poems capture hard-won personal evolution, all set in a troubled, volatile era.
In Trainor, the personal is never separate from minutiae. From, “I'm getting pretty good at pretending I'm OK” and “Take Venlafaxine. Take Zopiclone. / Some warm milk” to “Trump broods, Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy” and “UNPRECEDENTED MILITARIZATION,” the poet's images chronicle turmoil near and far.
The “I” of the poems may be self-medicating (until lines such as “With you / I am transformed” evoke the healing properties of new love), but she's forever cognizant of the outside world.
For eminent Quadra Island writer Bringhurst, poems are ruggedly capable vehicles for intrepid exploration. In The Ridge, Bringhurst ranges widely, touching on language and music, geology and nature. He's also drawn to meditate on — and wrangle with — history and the human animal. Particularly, in the majestic 59-page, 20-sectioned title poem, he dazzles with enormity of scale.
“The Ridge” begins as hike on an island (“a hip-pocket / continent and kingdom of its own”): “I lived with the woman I loved in the house / that we built on the flank of the ridge / at the end of the road at the start of the trail.” Soon, Bringhurst conjures planetary history and our recent, disastrous tenure on it.
Initially, Bringhurst's trail reveals tree trunks and bedrock. In a matter of two stanzas, the stately poem widens, to eons ago when the very ground, “was made entirely / of places you have never been, / inhabited by creatures you have never / seen and mostly never heard of, breathing / air not one of us would care for.”
The poem addresses the present moment—“right now we burn nine billion cords a year / from forests we have never seen: from trees / that grew on earth three million centuries / ago”; “we have / fracked to death who knows how many trillions / of tiny subterranean creatures” — and turns to “one species,” humanity: “the one that uses fire — is remarkably / like fire: insatiable, thus dangerous / to everything and lethal to itself.”
Across 64 elegant and melodious poems, Currin delves into spiritual quests, shares personal epiphanies (“I've learned there are a few things / I can't live without: / coffee, books, my body. / And friendship, it turns out”; “Have slept with too many divorcees”), and relates youthful experiences, painful and otherwise. And from transit rides to office tasks, Currin brews heady substance from quotidian routines.
For Currin's speakers, personal unease is heightened by planetary upheavals. The poems often grant worldwide crisis only a line or two, as though the “death of ice,” “the hottest / summer on record again,” and “I thought the
Earth was screeching / but she was just speaking / at the volume of fire,” are familiar brute facts that intrude into anyone's ordinary day of work, commitments, and errands. Crisis is a looming background, a coming storm.