Biogeography, by Sandra Meek
Tupelo, 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Abramowitz
Colorado Review
Sandra Meek’s Biogeography investigates the tension between the brutality and harmony of the earth’s organic processes and humankind’s uneasy relationship to those forces. Meek is a careful observer of nature and the self, her efforts clearly inspired by Emerson, and is fascinated by the metaphoric possibilities offered by scientific theory. While many of her descriptions of the quotidian—a frozen lake, an interminable wait on a grounded plane—are elevated by her original language and phrasing (“The earth’s / a cupped hand holding / its own broken bones”), sometimes where the simplicity of an image might pack the most punch, she gives in to the impulse to “poeticize” those observations, gilding a lily that needs no ornamentation. Ultimately, however, Meek’s commitment to revealing the beauty and mystery of nature obscured by modern life leaves the reader more receptive to the inscrutability of the planet’s intricate systems.
Meek is at heart a curious hybrid of explorer, botanist, geologist, and artist. Art, these poems seem to say, has its foundation in the structures described by science—which are themselves a kind of art—and the poems in this book suggest that the careful blending of the two disciplines represents a more truthful view of the world. “Event One” is built upon the (unproven) theory of an “instant ice age,” a swift, extreme change in climate that suggests the earth is subject not to gradual shifts, but devastating variations:
We spread across the temperate world as if it would last
forever, while millennia’s held breath
bubbled Greenland ice flowing surface-
forward, an extended
glance of light. Our climate’s history is clocked
in beetle casings, the thickening skins
lakes secret, articulations
of the body. If stars don’t destroy us, weather
will. We are its children.
Many of the poems in Biogeography draw upon the similarities between the evolution of the body and the earth’s ever-changing composition. In “Event One” the pronouns “we” and “us” ground this cataclysmic episode in the history of humankind, while the earth and the cosmos alternately threaten and cradle our burgeoning existence. Some of Meek’s best phrasing is instinctual, driven as much or more by the ear as by the obligation to flesh out a concept. At times, though, she italicizes a word to stand for a sensitivity to language (But the body’s adrift / in when, saturated with since”), a device that doesn’t quite earn a claim to mastery. Yet other strategies—such as the simple declaration “We are its children,” which could, in another context, smack of New Age drivel—are a relief from the accumulating images and dense language.
In her explorations, Meek is armed with both a telescope and a microscope, and often the reader gets both perspectives—sometimes simultaneously—within the poem. “Astraphobia,” for example, follows the speaker’s attempts to inure her dog to the “terror” of lightning and thunder, while concurrently meditating upon the nature of terror itself and the ways in which civilizations rise and fall according to its patterns:
Inside, cool
unattainable air: you can’t get
in without breaking
the way out and therefore failing
to escape history writing itself in exhaust
above the lake lined
with newly bloomed trees, spring’s
ghostly architecture made visible
bone by hollow bone. When the word is needed, the book
falls open to the page. Cities
crumble.
Occasionally a line or two in a poem will border on the operatic, too in love with its own grandness to work (“therefore failing / to escape history writing itself in exhaust” etc.). But so often does Meek get it right that her poems are at once lush and precise, expansive enough to incorporate complex scientific concepts and yet specific when they need to be (“spidering / to hairline fractures frozen across an eggshell”). In fact, it is when she balances metaphor and pure image that the writing is strongest, as in “Karma”:
A jaguar bounds
across the road, its coat a field of black eyes
haloed in light. The only tapir I saw
lay quartered and bleeding out
in a turquoise canoe. Lotusus stood by, opening
enormous red hands.
Even the most common plants and animals, especially when examined closely with the poet’s eye, are marvels of design and adaptation; “exotic” flora and fauna need poetic embellishment even less. The stark, almost geometrical juxtapositions of color in this passage do not reduce this flourishing landscape to a mere lab report; they are, instead, a condensation of the raw, enigmatic power of the jungle, the stone-stillness of that jaguar before the strike. Meek is so skilled at translating her observations into words that it is to her credit that she can restrain herself when appropriate.
The book is divided into four sections, each taking as its title a phrase, term, or idea from the study of the scientific narrative of the earth, while the poems within them test the metaphoric potential of that “other” language. Fittingly, the title Biogeography refers to the physical and temporal distribution of a variety of life forms, and not just the pretty ones. This is not a pastoral book; the reader will find no idealized memories or set pieces here. Rather, the poems unearth and expose the primordial link between humans and nature, as well as examine the speaker’s own fraught understanding of her place in the natural world.
Published in Colorado Review 36:3 (Fall/Winter 2009)
Tupelo, 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Abramowitz
Colorado Review
Sandra Meek’s Biogeography investigates the tension between the brutality and harmony of the earth’s organic processes and humankind’s uneasy relationship to those forces. Meek is a careful observer of nature and the self, her efforts clearly inspired by Emerson, and is fascinated by the metaphoric possibilities offered by scientific theory. While many of her descriptions of the quotidian—a frozen lake, an interminable wait on a grounded plane—are elevated by her original language and phrasing (“The earth’s / a cupped hand holding / its own broken bones”), sometimes where the simplicity of an image might pack the most punch, she gives in to the impulse to “poeticize” those observations, gilding a lily that needs no ornamentation. Ultimately, however, Meek’s commitment to revealing the beauty and mystery of nature obscured by modern life leaves the reader more receptive to the inscrutability of the planet’s intricate systems.
Meek is at heart a curious hybrid of explorer, botanist, geologist, and artist. Art, these poems seem to say, has its foundation in the structures described by science—which are themselves a kind of art—and the poems in this book suggest that the careful blending of the two disciplines represents a more truthful view of the world. “Event One” is built upon the (unproven) theory of an “instant ice age,” a swift, extreme change in climate that suggests the earth is subject not to gradual shifts, but devastating variations:
We spread across the temperate world as if it would last
forever, while millennia’s held breath
bubbled Greenland ice flowing surface-
forward, an extended
glance of light. Our climate’s history is clocked
in beetle casings, the thickening skins
lakes secret, articulations
of the body. If stars don’t destroy us, weather
will. We are its children.
Many of the poems in Biogeography draw upon the similarities between the evolution of the body and the earth’s ever-changing composition. In “Event One” the pronouns “we” and “us” ground this cataclysmic episode in the history of humankind, while the earth and the cosmos alternately threaten and cradle our burgeoning existence. Some of Meek’s best phrasing is instinctual, driven as much or more by the ear as by the obligation to flesh out a concept. At times, though, she italicizes a word to stand for a sensitivity to language (But the body’s adrift / in when, saturated with since”), a device that doesn’t quite earn a claim to mastery. Yet other strategies—such as the simple declaration “We are its children,” which could, in another context, smack of New Age drivel—are a relief from the accumulating images and dense language.
In her explorations, Meek is armed with both a telescope and a microscope, and often the reader gets both perspectives—sometimes simultaneously—within the poem. “Astraphobia,” for example, follows the speaker’s attempts to inure her dog to the “terror” of lightning and thunder, while concurrently meditating upon the nature of terror itself and the ways in which civilizations rise and fall according to its patterns:
Inside, cool
unattainable air: you can’t get
in without breaking
the way out and therefore failing
to escape history writing itself in exhaust
above the lake lined
with newly bloomed trees, spring’s
ghostly architecture made visible
bone by hollow bone. When the word is needed, the book
falls open to the page. Cities
crumble.
Occasionally a line or two in a poem will border on the operatic, too in love with its own grandness to work (“therefore failing / to escape history writing itself in exhaust” etc.). But so often does Meek get it right that her poems are at once lush and precise, expansive enough to incorporate complex scientific concepts and yet specific when they need to be (“spidering / to hairline fractures frozen across an eggshell”). In fact, it is when she balances metaphor and pure image that the writing is strongest, as in “Karma”:
A jaguar bounds
across the road, its coat a field of black eyes
haloed in light. The only tapir I saw
lay quartered and bleeding out
in a turquoise canoe. Lotusus stood by, opening
enormous red hands.
Even the most common plants and animals, especially when examined closely with the poet’s eye, are marvels of design and adaptation; “exotic” flora and fauna need poetic embellishment even less. The stark, almost geometrical juxtapositions of color in this passage do not reduce this flourishing landscape to a mere lab report; they are, instead, a condensation of the raw, enigmatic power of the jungle, the stone-stillness of that jaguar before the strike. Meek is so skilled at translating her observations into words that it is to her credit that she can restrain herself when appropriate.
The book is divided into four sections, each taking as its title a phrase, term, or idea from the study of the scientific narrative of the earth, while the poems within them test the metaphoric potential of that “other” language. Fittingly, the title Biogeography refers to the physical and temporal distribution of a variety of life forms, and not just the pretty ones. This is not a pastoral book; the reader will find no idealized memories or set pieces here. Rather, the poems unearth and expose the primordial link between humans and nature, as well as examine the speaker’s own fraught understanding of her place in the natural world.
Published in Colorado Review 36:3 (Fall/Winter 2009)