by Alice Major
TURNSTONE PRESS
2023/$18.00/96 pp.
A great book of poetry haunts. It makes you think about the unsettled edges of your own world, brings them into the light, not to dispel them but to stop you from forgetting they are there. Smoke never disappears, it only gets thin enough from time to time to seem that way. Among the many reasons to admire Alice Major has been her contribution to eco-poetics in both its political commitment and the poetic one that declares that nothing we know cannot find a home in poetry. Major will neither look away nor allow us to. If anything, with the continuing decline in the survivability of our planet, Alice Major’s poetic eye on life, on death, has offered us the poetics of eco-tragedy.
To read this book is to attend a play. In act one we experience fire in the present as an all-consuming power entwined with the myths of humanity, gods and giants. Form is method, and the lines here spread out across the page and are broken/not broken in a way that gives them the feeling of being spoken breathlessly—in terror or in awe. Myth, and here, poetry, is the attempt to contain the uncontrollable in language. It’s a vivid account of both the terrible past and a prophecy that’s coming true. I’m writing this review during months of even greater fires and the hottest weather ever recorded on Earth. This is the “Fate for Fire”: Ragnarok is the horizon.
The remaining sections of the book remind us of the worth of life through the beauty and discipline of poetic forms, each the fitting voice of its section—among them the poem “Knife on Snow,” its numbered sections fitting together like clues, with the poet a detective looking for the rationality behind the unexplained and the violent; the haibun for “Travels in the Solar System,” in which wondrous facts about the dead planets that surround us are also metaphors for our deepest feelings; and sonnets, a form many consider fossilized, for “The Last Ediacarans,” about a life form long ago made extinct when Earth’s planet-spanning changes destroyed its own creations.
Each difference is a variation on a theme, as the recurring choral voice of “End Times” reminds us. But even in the most contemplative of the poems, the words “hammer” and “iron” and “fire” occur again and again. The knife is Surtur’s blade, the hammer is its forging. But it isn’t the demon of Norse myth doing that work. It’s us. The blade is steel and hot, the fire is rising and we cannot look away. It’s been said that art’s value is the way it lets us escape the world. But if that was ever so, that value’s time has passed. The beauty of the poems here is not the siren beauty of forgetting the world, but a beauty that rouses the resolve to save it.
Richard Harrison is the author of seven books of poetry
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