Democracy of Fire: Poems
By Susan Cohen
Broadstone Books | 2022 | 78 pages
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
– Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map”
Taking in the sweep of a poetry book can feel like assembling a bird’s-eye view. Our experience unfolds poem by poem. A wholeness emerges. The book-as-map holds concerns, intentions, and aesthetics entwined in ways that elude prediction. Susan Cohen’s Democracy of Fire exemplifies such cartography. Its poems arrive like field notes from complex terrain where “an ocean is an open question,” a doe “tastes disappearance in a leaf,” and the reader is both confidante and co-explorer of our moment in the Anthropocene.
Cohen brings multifaceted training and sensibilities to this enterprise, her third full-length collection. A science journalist, poet, and diasporic student of language and culture, she inquires with focus and receptivity, giving us a whole that carefully builds toward the promises of its title. Through three well-hewn sections, a nexus of natural and political forces presents crises, but also humility, affection, and insights that blur conventional labels.
The opening poems admit as much wonderment as wisdom, encompassing travel, grief, linguistics, partnership, fossils, and art. In “Anthropometry,” the speaker follows power dynamics of artist and subject, medium and audience, as she imagines a model dragged “across the canvas, his living brush,” and looks “for any preserved geography of flesh.” Often, what launches from one domain lands the poet, and us, in quite another. As in the trenchant “Bright Clutter,” where capitalist vanity drops us onto the factual image-scape of tragedy.
Because I read about space junk and glimpsed that image
of a Tesla, mannequin at the wheel as it shot past Mars,
today I see my nephew floating in the ocean. He travels
as molecules among glittering galaxies of fish,
but I see him back inside his skull, mutely mouthing
underwater. His small plane plunged to the Pacific
years ago, linking what’s above with what’s below.
There is no deflecting, no cushioned landing—we are carried by lyric power.
Nearby narratives wield lyricism of geology and weather. “I could make a poem from the syntax of gabbro, tufa, schist,” “Wildness blows off the Sierras: scent of snowmelt / and stone” (“Muted”); and “a bug takes me for natural, / landing to nurse on my salt” (“Natural History”). Cohen’s is an artful diction, drawing lexical elements from varied disciplines to serve the music of each phrase, without overplaying the trappings of any one discipline, including science, for authoritative weight.
Scientific themes are at home in these pages, in notably unassuming ways. The “Science News” prose-poems, appearing in small clusters throughout the book, read as dispatches from ample imaginative territory. In one, a composite headline about languages facing extinction delivers brisk rhythmic punches: “Inside languages: a lung and its lunge for breath, the way the mind can gun the tongue.” And another metrically inventive sentence, from a headline about the shape of the universe: “A red sunset smears itself flat over the final day of a shapeless year.”
Cohen’s rhythmic and prosodic skills allow her to layer conversational and anecdotal passages with deceptive levity. We might not realize what we’ve traversed until finding ourselves, with the speaker, in a moment of astonishment, mea culpa, gratitude, humor, personal or collective horror, or several of these at once—a wry use of telling-as-showing.
Science News: Amphibians Glow. Humans Just Couldn’t See It—Until Now
Someone thought to shine a blue light, and discovered brilliance on a tiger salamander’s back. Gobs of green. Marbled salamander, Cranwell’s horned frog, newt with neon stripes. Their beauty dulled by limitations of the human eye. Possibly such flare serves to unnerve their predators. Silly newts. Don’t they know how much we cannot see, and yet we stomp everywhere.
The orchestration of iambic stretches, spondees, and deft assonance (“… flare serves to unnerve their predators”) leverages strengths of this hybrid form. These tools are also at work in the lineated poems, building depth through variation. From the anapestic “In the sweep of the delicate world you and I are the axe” (“They’ve Discovered Spiders Can Hear Us”), to the persuasive consonance and assonance of “I am a beginner, giddy with untested gutturals” (“Another Alphabet”) and “To need / no protection of bone and leave no fossil” (“In Respect to the Jellyfish”).
If Democracy of Fire sets out with awareness of climate, memory, politics, and relatedness, its path travels systems where these are in play. This coming together of domains suggests the term ecotone, which feels like an apt metaphor for the whole collection. As transitional spaces, ecotones contain aspects of adjacent communities and products of their interactions. Cohen has created spaces in which particular crises—local and distant, human and other—collide and interact, driven by confluent forces.
Language, exile, and migration provide some of the most searing markers. “Report on the State of the World’s Children” devastates with simple, declarative sentences; some brief, others spilling from stanza to stanza.
… I was born
at the wrong time. They took me to a place
of tents and snow. The heat was fire
and they rationed the flames.
Winter entered to sleep with us,
also men harsher than winter.
In a later poem, amidst “a surfeit of endings / we cannot take in our arms,” the very seas “rise up and our children are stranded / in their one time to live” (“In Greenland the Ice Sheet”). And the coronavirus pandemic enters, almost like an overlay: “If our mouths / were not masked, our excitement / would be un-muffled…” (“Hoop After Hoop”).
“Democracy” and “fire” share an especially fertile nexus that intensifies in the closing pages. Here, as in earlier poems, musings on hope and delight are not separate from recognition of crisis—they are as interconnected as other forces and insights the poems explore. Whether prayer-like (“Ephemera,” “Breathing Fire from Paradise”), resolutely irreverent (“Photosynthesis”), or meditative (“Just When”), the creaturely, planetary, and cosmic all bear on the poet’s thinking, creating another vein of democracy.
This equity of imaginative attention pervades Democracy of Fire, and is perhaps its most unexpected gift. Cohen shares her puzzlement and crafts openings. She offers curious closures and generous, inviting journeys that any reader will be grateful to embark upon. If we can let dung beetles model “knowing how to steer—by sun or moon—through hazardous geographies,” we might find our way to wondrous new geometries. “Let forward be a shape. Also, tomorrow.”
Poet and recovering engineer Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics (Red Mountain Press, 2018), and recent essays spanning memoir, science, travel, and satire. The recipient of a Djerassi Residency, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and MOSAIC America Fellowship, she served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California. Her work appears in venues such as The Common, POETRY, The Threepenny Review, Leonardo, Amsterdam Quarterly, and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology.
Header photo by Tobias Nöff, courtesy Pixabay.
