From “Keepers: A Review of Adcock, Meek, Kennedy and Blakely”
By Phebe Davidson
for Asheville Poetry Review
Biogeography, Sandra Meek’s Dorset Prize winner, is also preoccupied with time’s passing, the impact of event, and (of particular importance to the poet) the possibility of meaning. Because the word “biogeography” denotes the study of the distribution of living things, it is no surprise that the poems take on as their subject life in the natural world, or that the place of humanity in the planet’s biogeography is a key concern. Yet surprise enlivens these poems. Meek starts with the premise that “mile zero” is “satellite dish / starless and webbed” and that luck is what we have to go on. She offers us a fierce conflagration:
lapping up trees
as if all would be made visible
in our end. Before mushrooms, small
gray ears, bloomed in the ash, something to gather
before night’s lit with the static
of remote fires and the one
unblinking star pacing the sky
catching our voices, casting them down.
(“Chronographia”)
Surprises here include the echo of a Biblical star in the eavesdropping satellite’s “unblinking” face, the irony of our own voices cast down from on high, and the “small / gray ears” that we hurry to gather. Gray food indeed, in a ruined landscape that still manages to send up living things, to (with luck) support more life. A river becomes a sort of salvation:
Breathe in, and you are that clarity
cradled before word, before the fracture
between rainforest and jungle . . .
Not content with an easy stance, Meek reminds us there is more to consider:
Continental drift, the earth as steeled plates
crashing together¾however you read
the history of the planet, it all scopes down
to points of ash, small fires dotting a forest village
to keep the bush down.
(“Courantijn River”)
She asks:
Listen: do you hear the teeth
approaching, do you trust the light, how it eats equally into
shadow and green? Have you noticed? The body without air goes blue
letting in the sky.
(“Courantijn River”)
Images that suggest terrible threat simultaneously with a kind of blue freedom are typical of Meek’s vision. There is a balance here, discomfiting and ambiguous, but undeniable. As Meek makes clear, in the world we know,
Nothing
doesn’t fade. Nothing
doesn’t go hungry and unanswered
into night haunted by a sun which may or
may not be signaling
its own dying in that flawed
and welcomed light.
(“Mapping the Drift”)
Meek assures her readers “the story of beginnings is always / God as a ray of light” and that the flight of crows is “a black thread sewn / to its own unraveling. (“Departing Flight”). What she delivers is a balance in language that is all but incandescent. Biogeography is an extraordinary achievement. These poems are weighted with love of world and word, full of incipient loss that haunts even when the images fade. Gratefully, I find myself returning to “Anniversary,” which tells me that “the body’s / adrift in when, saturated with since,” and that a November image of river and field is, metaphysically and metaphorically, the perfect extension of the human condition:
. . . One more failed surrender
an oak leaf’s clawed hand pinwheels
along the current, nothing but gravity
bearing it down.
Published in Asheville Poetry Review 16:1 (2009): Issue 19
By Phebe Davidson
for Asheville Poetry Review
Biogeography, Sandra Meek’s Dorset Prize winner, is also preoccupied with time’s passing, the impact of event, and (of particular importance to the poet) the possibility of meaning. Because the word “biogeography” denotes the study of the distribution of living things, it is no surprise that the poems take on as their subject life in the natural world, or that the place of humanity in the planet’s biogeography is a key concern. Yet surprise enlivens these poems. Meek starts with the premise that “mile zero” is “satellite dish / starless and webbed” and that luck is what we have to go on. She offers us a fierce conflagration:
lapping up trees
as if all would be made visible
in our end. Before mushrooms, small
gray ears, bloomed in the ash, something to gather
before night’s lit with the static
of remote fires and the one
unblinking star pacing the sky
catching our voices, casting them down.
(“Chronographia”)
Surprises here include the echo of a Biblical star in the eavesdropping satellite’s “unblinking” face, the irony of our own voices cast down from on high, and the “small / gray ears” that we hurry to gather. Gray food indeed, in a ruined landscape that still manages to send up living things, to (with luck) support more life. A river becomes a sort of salvation:
Breathe in, and you are that clarity
cradled before word, before the fracture
between rainforest and jungle . . .
Not content with an easy stance, Meek reminds us there is more to consider:
Continental drift, the earth as steeled plates
crashing together¾however you read
the history of the planet, it all scopes down
to points of ash, small fires dotting a forest village
to keep the bush down.
(“Courantijn River”)
She asks:
Listen: do you hear the teeth
approaching, do you trust the light, how it eats equally into
shadow and green? Have you noticed? The body without air goes blue
letting in the sky.
(“Courantijn River”)
Images that suggest terrible threat simultaneously with a kind of blue freedom are typical of Meek’s vision. There is a balance here, discomfiting and ambiguous, but undeniable. As Meek makes clear, in the world we know,
Nothing
doesn’t fade. Nothing
doesn’t go hungry and unanswered
into night haunted by a sun which may or
may not be signaling
its own dying in that flawed
and welcomed light.
(“Mapping the Drift”)
Meek assures her readers “the story of beginnings is always / God as a ray of light” and that the flight of crows is “a black thread sewn / to its own unraveling. (“Departing Flight”). What she delivers is a balance in language that is all but incandescent. Biogeography is an extraordinary achievement. These poems are weighted with love of world and word, full of incipient loss that haunts even when the images fade. Gratefully, I find myself returning to “Anniversary,” which tells me that “the body’s / adrift in when, saturated with since,” and that a November image of river and field is, metaphysically and metaphorically, the perfect extension of the human condition:
. . . One more failed surrender
an oak leaf’s clawed hand pinwheels
along the current, nothing but gravity
bearing it down.
Published in Asheville Poetry Review 16:1 (2009): Issue 19