This One We Call Ours: Poems
Martha Silano
Lynx House Press | 2024 | 84 pages
We may rarely be conscious of realities that lie beyond human experience and perception—from life on a rock travelling at tremendous speed in its orbit around the sun to the rhythms, pulsations, and scales of vegetal nature. Martha Silano’s sixth book of poetry This One We Call Ours reminds us of these realities and conjures realms beyond the human, weaving the planetary, the animal, and the vegetal into the local and the deeply personal. Here, one’s self is “a tousled cosmos, a strongly-winded daisy, a wound-down reef” and human creations are “crawling with spiders, wiry like lichen, swaying with catkins, quiet like clumps of moss.”
Part reckoning, part elegy, and part celebration, the collection gestures toward cosmic origins while moving into an uncertain future. It is Silano’s way of capturing the relationship between the human and a rapidly changing Earth at a time when the human has come to figure as a geological force akin to a volcanic eruption or a meteorite strike.
The opening poem, “What They Said,” plunges the reader into space, into Earth’s ionosphere and the search for black holes. As if to quiet the restless, persistent chatter of science, however, the poem sets the stage for a probing into the deeper layers of a living, breathing Earth—a “swirling infinite blackness” and a “sucking power no Dyson has ever known.” In many instances, Silano embeds her revelations in retellings of our universe’s creation that connect cosmic radiation with our own planetarity, as in the poem “Once:”
No one was around,
no one with vision or a craving for lemons.
All there was: stars and exploding stars seeding the universe
with magnesium and carbon, with graphite and diamonds.
All this, and what all else, collected into a pomegranitic
bulge that became our sun, that became the rocky planets
and the gaseous ones, that became the generous
light through pines, us and our armpit glands.
The poem makes palpable that which exceeds our spontaneous sensory perception of a radiant orb traversing our sky: rays that by the time they reach our retina represent the past, as it takes minutes for sunlight to reach our planet. It tells the story of a beginning that persists, a story that places the sun in intimate relation with the human body and that reminds us of the life-giving presence permeating all living things. Comparing the sun’s casting forth rays of light to the casting forth of seed, Silano connects earth and sky in ways that explain the emergence of “figs and plumage, / rain drops and touch … Falling water / and falling in love … our shiny silver fillings, our stalks / of wheat, our shocks of turquoise hair.” Seen in light of our literal entanglements with cosmic matter, to widen our view of earthly existence is to open ourselves to what lies beyond the human.
Where scientific measurements, integral to our understanding of the current climate crisis, are not experienced universally, unity, as Silano’s collection suggests, still depends on a sense of a shared reality, one that acknowledges wildfires, species extinction, floods, and pollution, as in “In a Font Called Avenir Book,” where a paper mill’s sludge results in:
arsenic, dioxins, sewage,
and petroleum under a rayless orange sun,
a single common tansy, humble bloom that doesn’t
blind, shrouded in smoke. The haze we know
like our own bodies, its vents, its faults, its uncontainable
fires quadrupling in a matter of hours, an entire region
given a red flag warning. That kind of dry fuel,
that kind of potential for being licked.
Connecting back to the poem’s opening where the speaker tries to “explain [her cat’s] sandpaper tongue, / how she stretches her paw along my arm,” the poem’s closing lines shift attention away from pollution as an abstraction towards its concrete, visceral, and often fatal consequences to bodies—both human and nonhuman. Reminding us of our sensorial bond with other beings, they evoke our perceptions and sensations as part of a vast sensory web spanning poppies and their “bronchial / leaves” in “Poppy Love” and crickets who “see with something else” than eyes in “Vast.” Here, the living body represents the very possibility of tactile encounters where seasons, as in “No Rain,” are not just names but experiences like planting “spinach and kale” and “picking chanterelles.” It is when we begin to consciously attend to our surroundings through the senses that purely human concerns slip toward the background and that this shared reality comes into view.
This One We Call Ours addresses other truths that may be more troubling and harder to accept. The poem “What Can I Tell You,” for instance, helps us think about the limitations in rendering palpable what Silano terms the “voice” of the Earth: “Physicists call it a hum, / an exceedingly quiet symphony, a ceaseless rumble… though dang, / it’s completely imperceptible to the human ear, / audible only to seismometers.” Anatomically unequipped to perceive Earth’s hum, we are equally oblivious to the geological clues it provides into Earth’s interior:
So here we are, rotating, revolving,
speeding not only through the cosmos
at 1,000 miles an hour,
but running a red light at 23rd and Pacific, late to some appointment—
eye, ear, nose, throat—speeding toward a solution
for our creaky knees, sore hips,
our agony or ennui.
Too distracted by daily routines to remember our place on Earth, the evolutionary paths we share with other species, and “our planetwide decline” as proclaimed in the poem “Final Hours!,” we yet attend to organs—“eye, ear, nose, throat”—that allow us to connect with this living, sentient planet, to take in, as in “You’re Surrounded,” Earth’s “green forgiveness, summer’s narcotic sorbets.”
What inspired me the most in this collection is Silano’s philosophical depth paired with references to popular culture and the mundane of everyday life in ways that are whimsical and lyrically daring. What may appear as mere playfulness often reveals a keen critical edge resulting in a tone at once resigned and zealous, somber and humorous, vexed and compassionate. Thus, for instance, if there is grief after the death of a loved one, as in “Poem Written One Hundred Yards from My Mother’s Grave,” there is also joy in recognizing our place in a more-than-human cosmos and in connecting with those who are both ancestor and kin:
Of course, when a pileated woodpecker flies close, lets go
a high-pitched e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e, I know it’s her
as well as I know it’s not,
but that something was making sure, when the universe formed, gravity
wasn’t too strong—not enough to break atoms apart, not so weak
they couldn’t hold them together, expanding into now.
The speaker’s experience raises foundational questions about how to represent our genealogical relationship to the cosmos and the porous boundaries between different elements in a complex network of relation where death “is the miracle of what had sustained us / morphing into what’s needed to reduce us to nitrogen / and phosphorous, to return us to the Earth where we’ll make a rich soil / for basil and thyme,” as Silano puts it in “Oh, Autolysis.”
As much as Silano draws attention to the planetary threat looming on the horizon, we cannot help feeling propelled to look skywards, to turn towards our cosmic origins, to figure alternative possibilities for the present and future. “There must be a way to save us / from ourselves. There must be a cloud or shroud / or asteroid belt, a minor planet that can knock us back / onto a non-deadly trajectory,” Silano writes in “If We Were Not So Single-Minded.” The poem places earthly salvation less inside than outside of ourselves. It may allude to widespread disruptions to Earth’s ecosystems, potentially causing mass extinctions, as agents of change; as Silano writes, “What’s hidden is how we’re more like dandelions than dragonflies. / What’s hidden is where the music goes once it escapes / its strings, its hollow avenues of sound.” Similar to a dandelion seed whose feathery parachute of soft, white hairs allows it to be carried by the wind, so the seeds of all earthly life and their dispersal are dependent upon ecological flows. A broader meaning thus emerges from the common human gesture of holding up the white moon-like puff ball of a mature dandelion, making a wish, and blowing to send its little parachutes into the world. It is this balancing of human desires and life’s deeper truths infusing Silano’s collection that will enthrall any reader.
Mirja Lobnik is a poet, literary critic, and educator. Exploring indigenous and postcolonial literatures, ecological entanglements, and the role of the senses in human experience and imagination, her work has appeared in literary journals and edited collections, including Modern Fiction Studies, South Atlantic Review, The Neglected West: Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature, Tiny Seed Journal, Plant Your Words, and, most recently, Literature and the Senses: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. She teaches in the Department of English at Agnes Scott College.
Header photo by Benni, courtesy Pixabay.
