April is Poetry Month, and to celebrate, I humbly offer for your consideration two recently published poetry collections from contemporary poets. When was the last time you read a book of poems? Who reads poetry nowadays, anyway? My thinking is, perhaps we should. Poetry stirs my mind to soften, to move from thought to thought with greater fluidity and heightened curiosity, a more generous receptivity to the subtler whisperings of things. I suspect such a thaw could be good for us.
Primordial by Mai Der Vang
Mai Der Vang’s previous collection, Yellow Rain (2021), for which she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, stitched together declassified government documents, victim testimony, and medical reports along strands of spare, bracing verse to construct an incisive poetic indictment of the chemical weapons attacks reported by the Hmong people – and denied by the U.S. government – in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. With Primordial, Vang returns to the war-scarred forest of Vietnam and Laos, this time to document the plight of another of its inhabitants: the critically endangered saola. A goat-sized ungulate resembling an antelope but in fact more closely related to cows, the saola is elusive enough that the last-known photograph of the creature was taken in 2013. Because of its rarity as well as its graceful, solitary nature, it is also known as the Asian unicorn. Treading carefully to avoid exploiting the saola as a metaphor in the manufacture of human-centered meaning, Vang places the animal’s precipitous decline to the edge of extinction alongside the cultural precarity of the Hmong, tracing these dual dispossessions to reveal how the fates human and nonhuman victims of military violence interweave. That Vang is herself the daughter of Hmong refugees, and was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy while writing Primordial, lends her poems a special force and poignancy as meditations on mothering in an age of collective trauma, the solemn beauty of nursing life in a world within which so much has been lost and goes on disappearing.
The Opening Ritual by G.C. Waldrep
It doesn’t exactly sound like high praise to say that a poem tastes like dust, but if you can imagine the how the dust in some silent, long-disused country church sparkles in muted polychrome as the day’s first light filters through it, and how that dust contains the shed cells of all the creatures who have stood within this space, how it cycled through their lungs; if you can imagine how the dust has trembled with the voices of these creatures, then the poems in G.C. Waldrep’s The Opening Ritual taste like dust, and what I mean is that a tincture of the sacred sifts through them. And if we are speaking of the sacred, then it’s worth noting that many of these poems were written during Waldrep’s tenure as Artist-in-Residence at Acadia. You can tell he was there: they are poems of yearning for crags, lichen, loam, ice. Addressing a bracket fungus, Waldrep asks, “Is it possible / that your experience / is a form of joy? / Or a word for joy, / in an unspeakable / tongue.” Waldrep is listening for the answers, and I want to know them, too.
