This One We Call Ours by Martha Silano
Lynx House Press, 2024.
112 pages. $25.
Reviewed by Amanda Auchter
Martha Silano’s newest collection, This One We Call Ours (winner of the Blue Lynx Prize), continues the important dialogue formed in contemporary eco-poetry. These poems sit in conversations with other major eco-poets such as Mary Oliver, Camille T. Dungy, Joy Harjo, Jorie Graham, and Julianna Spahr. These are poems of transformation and examination of consciousness and beauty, of limitations and destruction of this planet where “[sometimes we’re less garbage gyre, more string quartet. / Sometimes we take a catastrophe, turn it into a kiss” (“We Are All Magnificent”).
The Poetry Foundation states that “Ecopoetics places emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the writing of poems—and the environment that produces it” and Silano’s eighth collection does exactly this. Each poem is a careful rendering of the tension built between a world where “maples are busy / making samaras beside Coke cans, empty / bags of Doritos” (“Leading a Nature Walk on 23rd & Yesler”) and the natural beauty this one planet gives us, even in its minutiae.
This One We Call Ours gives voice to the looming threat of ecological disaster on both the macro and micro levels. These poems function as an essential, lyrical treatise on how “we are so, so fucked” (“Love Song for the Anthropocene”) due to humanity’s direct effect on the global environment.
Silano’s collection of poems is broken into four sections, each representing a yearly season. Each section (or season) is given an eco-apocalyptic title, such as: “Carry an Inhaler, Stuck Indoors with Air Purifiers, Air Quality Index Apps Season [formerly autumn].” Each section does the important work of moving the reader through greater and greater challenges and ecological disasters, until we are, the poems warn,
Hoping
for the best, but what is best, but what is hope
but cramming your head into a sandbag,
dragging it down to the powerful water.
“In the Late Anthropocene”
There are numerous poems throughout This One We Call Ours which refer to Anthropocene directly via title or indirectly through described action. Anthropocene is a still-contested scientific theory by which the idea of human interaction holds a direct correlation to global climate change. It is used as a model to assess and warn the effects of human activities on sea levels, animal extinction, plant and soil composition, and ever-increasing natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. In This One We Call Ours, however, Silano utilizes this term to describe a geological era in where “[u]nintended fire storms and thrice blessed / over-consumptive coming at me, at you, triggering / an earlier-than-suspected 21st Century boom” (“Final Hours!”)
In the first Anthropocene poem, “After Apple Picking, Late Anthropocene,” in a not so subtle nod to the famous Robert Frost pastoral poem, “After Apple Picking,” which describes a long day of apple picking and the desire to rest after being among a bounty of apples and trees, Silano’s poem begins in a more grotesque manner, setting the tone for not only the poem’s argument and dramatic situation, but juxtaposes itself in sharp contrast to the original Frost. Silano begins:
My puke-green stool is standing in the rain
beside a tree about to be slashed by the jaws
of a bright orange monster.
The utilization of “puke green” and “orange monster” create tension in a dramatic narrative arc that is already rife with the warning: this planet is not okay. This is not Frost’s bucolic landscape. This is a new era that we have created, one where
After we’ve burned or drenched it all, after every river’s
un-or over-run, after we’re bulldozed under, Mother Earth
will heave a great sigh, crack open a Bud.
(“After Apple Picking, Late Anthropocene”)
The anthropomorphic behavior of Earth is necessary here, and creates an important link between human’s long laissez faire behavior and attitude with the planet and the eventual outcome of its demise. Mother Earth will get the last laugh, Silano suggests, although we as humans, will perish.
This One We Call Ours is not all doom and gloom, however. There are many moments of tender beauty, of elegiac lyricism that ground the inevitable collapse. In the collection’s prologue poem, “What They Said,” Silano marvels at both Earth and the vastness of the universe in which it lives, writing, “with its 100 billion planets / with its one planet with one ocean. This one we call ours.” These are powerful poems that instill a reckoning, a call to action before it’s too late. Silano’s This One We Call Ours is the collection we need at the time we need it most. Silano reminds that “even in our bones” there are “bits of stars” (“We Are All Magnificent”), that all hope is not lost, and asks the most important question of even the most cynical of us all: “[i]f everything ends, // why are you sharpening your sorrow, / running to catch the discomfort” (“Everything Ends”).
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.
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