“Refugia,” the book’s epigraph reminds us, “are areas of relatively unaltered climate that are inhabited by plants and animals during a period of continental climatic change . . . and remain as a center of relict forms from which a new dispersion and speciation may take place after climatic readjustment.” The very word “refugia” is, therefore, what Northrop Frye termed a romance: a narrative that looks at first like a tragedy, but is redeemed at the end — not exactly into a comic conclusion, but at least a more hopeful one.
And that is the feeling I got from Kyce Bello’s first poem collection, Refugia. Indications of a changing ecosystem pepper the poems: “Our trajectory a measure / of water stress, // three death a status in three: plant, region, globe.” So, “here we are at collapse,” and yet — and yet, “Though sun reaches our faces // we hold ourselves apart / and name ourselves // after what we have survived.” This passage, from the first of nine sections of the title poem, which are dispersed over the course of the book, is indicative: the signs of planetary crisis are all around, in the plants and animals of an apparently rural New Mexico setting, but the speaker (and nuclear family) at the center of things will find beauty in life nonetheless, and carry on. Wallace Stevens wrote that modern poetry is “the mind in the act of finding / what will suffice,” and I get a sense of a mind doing just that, in this book, in spite of increasingly insufficient resources. “For decades,” Bello writes, in “The Tree Coroners,” the scientists have “watched two degrees determine / by which means a tree will choose to die — / hunger or thirst.” Yet the speaker dreams of “resurrection ferns unfurling”; so “Which boast to believe? My own, / or their malediction?” What scientists see as prediction — becomes a “malediction,” suggesting some degree of resistance to (or shocked disbelief of) the conclusions to which their evidence points. There is the evidence of the senses, too: “It’s been June all January. Like the creek, / I’ve turned to sand.” What to do, if you live in an arid land? “Among our options there is creeping north // like moose fleeing ticks, / and yet I want to stay still” . . . . The options are flight or freeze. The speaker knows they’re contributing to the problem, but can’t stop, but wishes someone would solve it: “I drive to the market for more flowers // wishing that driving were already banned” . . . . But the lyric “I” always seems to look on the bright side of life. The family travels “dirt roads that exhaust us / with die-off — every confier between Platoro / and South Fork shaggy-limbed and gray, snags / mapping the mountain’s black lung”; but at least there is arnica growing in the clearings, “the yellow sprawl of petals caught / in long shafts of unhampered, unblocked light.” I guess the poem registers both the sadness of mass tree-death and also the making-do of clipping some of the medicinal herb and driving on. And I guess that’s a good thing. At least a way to carry on. One doesn’t get the sense of urgency or immediate existential threat in Refugia that one gets in the work of mónica teresa ortiz (see March 10). However, there is occasionally a hint that the speaker understands that the climate crisis is a threat not just to the trees, but to their way of life. Even if “[s]natched remnants of the old world crowded / into this refuge” of a canyon, still, it’s with “our houses burned behind us.” In one very fine serial poem, “Archipelago with Ancestral Bodies and Unnamed Landmarks of the Present,” we detect the voices of other people . . . who seem rather concerned: One records the names of birds her children will not know; One wants to marry but not be a stepmother; One says, thank you for listening to me keen with my words; One adds, it is the finality that is so hard; One waits for hummingbirds to bring messages; One can only wonder at the line she tries to draw, insistent in its wavering across the page. The last section of “Refugia” is perhaps the darkest: “O, pre-dawn // water potential, how I do fear your / reduction”; the family is snapping at one another and “Who has studied // our survival and can tell me when this / degree / of tension will decrease?” Nonetheless, the poem ends with an image of an apple tree sprouting again from a stump and mother taking child into her arms, “Nestle her against my belly, // where she still fits.” I am not a parent — in no small part because of the perils & fears that Bello’s book makes very clear. But if I were, I imagine I would have to find a supreme fiction, in the face of even the best of the worst-case scenarios. I am genetically & culturally predisposed to a gloomy view of things (another reason to avoid reproducing!); but I also think it’s downright healthy (not to mention rational) to consider worst-case scenarios — both as a way to prepare for them (mentally and logistically) and maybe spur us to try to avoid them. But there still needs to be something worth preserving — virtue, beauty, humanity, religion, or the existence of life itself — that allows one to carry on. Refugia is in the tradition of American nature poetry, and as such is often compelled to dispense wisdom and maintain a tone of earnest wonder. Nonetheless, unlike most nature poems, these attempt to take account of the ways in which the nature of nature is changing — and to find a way for a human family to continue to live with(in) it.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |