Biogeography
by Sandra Meek
Tupelo Press, 2008
Reviewed by Jazzy Danziger, for Meridian
Even as we are made fearful by talk of tsunamis, global warming, or phenomena on a smaller scale—ice formations on the wings of airplanes, for instance—it is refreshing to read poet Sandra Meek’s Biogeography, an examination of our uncertain relationship with Earth. Biogeography, the 2006 winner of Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize, is concerned with materials, with blood, bone, rock, and steel. As Meek travels between landscapes, she dissolves our notion of the separateness of nature and humanity, of physicality and time. “Quaternary,” the title of the book’s first section, refers to the geologic time period in which humans have existed. By using the name of a time scale defined through stratigraphy, the study of rock layers, Meek establishes the book’s concern with the interconnectivity of time and space. The title of the book’s first poem, “Chronographia,” means a description of time, but the poem starts spatially: “Begin at mile zero.” By her first line, Meek has introduced us to the tension at the heart of Biogeography: the human’s difficult navigation of an unpredictable, ever-changing earth in the context of unyielding time.
Meek writes, “the body’s adrift / in when, saturated with since.” By looking at the rings of a tree, a “fan of veins/ purpling” an ankle, the darker layers of soil that reveal oceans that once covered the continent, Meek shows us that the earth and the human body can act as natural clocks. Her poems have a knowing but never didactic tone as she explores the relationship between nature and the human form. She reminds us of the body’s earthly beauty: a woman’s exploding heart “spill[s] her room // to a startling ruby.” The body is “a clay vase thrown / around an absent fist.” She asks, Are the earth and the human at odds, or are they part of each other? How do they shape each other, imitate each other? Of weather, she writes, “We are its children.” And yet, there is danger in this relationship. Meek envisions an earth that is blindly powerful and a human race that cannot help but be its mirror. Manmade objects imitate those from the sky: “wooden cross / starring the roadside; silver jet trail / expanding as it fades, nderscoring then canceling the clouds’ / inscrutable calligraphy.” And this calligraphy, writing, is also key; language is a code.Words are “landscape, and climatology, the theory / of our eminent end.” The “eminent”/”imminent” pun is crucial. Meek depicts nature’s temperament as both majestic and threatening.
Biogeography’s poems place us on the precipice of disaster even as they celebrate the world. In “Event One,” our violent human history is seen in soil sections: “138 feet, Atlanta / is burning; 2500 feet down, Socrates sips hemlock.” But the buried past isn’t past alone—it’s warning. Meek writes, “What calmed / six thousand years ago stopped // the wandering; cities were born, and alphabets,” but the physical evidence of an instant ice age shows “that lost theory of doom, not global warming’s / slow slippage, but what can calm / can craze again.” Meek believes that nature may owe us nothing.
A loose hierarchy is established: earth, human, technology. Still, all are connected, all spring from the same origin and have power. As Meek describes the mechanics of these relationships, she is concerned with the body’s fragility, how technology can keep us breathing, kill us, become us. A car crash disfigures a woman; doctors “carved the crushed leg // away from her stalled body, which felt its leaving // as an expansion of light.” But in “Coma,” she asks, “What sound does the soul make / leaving the body? And how distinguish it / from the machine’s pump and sigh / from steel / crashing against steel?”
Meek’s language is bold and crashing even as it acknowledges its smallness against infinite time, infinite biological and geologic shifts. She masterfully places the personal against the global, making monumental jumps. In “Om, with Kelp and Crows” the contrast of images is staggering: “A shrimp caught above tide / spirals between rocks, one small // margin of terror. A mountain boils / to the south, readying // to blow.” Amazingly, these disparate images can inhabit the same space. In the world of Biogeography, it isn’t presumptuous to assume that when a skater crushes her wrist by falling on hard ice, that same ice will almost drown a woman who “drags her rescuer /…climbing his body / mid-lake,” or that that ice has a more global power, is the first sign of a climatological shift.
Meek’s exercises in contrast and spatial definition are flat at times (a hummingbird “[dives] into the bay window // demonstrating not sky”) but ultimately forgivable in light of other successes: “What weather taught: milk breath / on the pane meant self.” Meek is at her best when she shows us how to define ourselves through nature. In the book’s third section, she explores the near tectonic force of political and religious violence. “Fort Zeelandia” concerns the December Murders that took place in Suriname, 1982, in which fifteen people were executed for opposing the country’s military regime. As the poet imagines the victims “cut down to symbols of dissent,” she notes how the distance of time and space can appear to erase atastrophe: “Twenty-one years, and no one has answered / for those knocks in the night….What can’t be seen from space: the Great Wall // crumbling, coral reefs / boiling to oblivion.”
The language of Biogeography seamlessly moves between hope and quiet apprehension. In “Chronographia” the poet writes, “the forest floor / littered with possibility, pine needles knit / like wishbones’ twinned arms. / Break one: luck’s what remains / most whole.” A cross section of these packed lines might resemble layers of sediment: the conflicting emotions of these revelations are stacked upon each other, not so that we read pleasure on one line and pain on the next, but pleasure and pain together. These moments of tension are so fragile, so based in that beautiful and subtle doubleness of words, that they risk invisibility. How easily we might miss the dark undercurrent and blame of the phrase “littered with possibility,” but Meek takes the risk. Eventually these tricks of language build to form a thunderous, collective power. The result is a book so deeply textured that it is nearly felt on the skin.
—Jazzy Danziger
Published in Meridian 23 (May 2009).
by Sandra Meek
Tupelo Press, 2008
Reviewed by Jazzy Danziger, for Meridian
Even as we are made fearful by talk of tsunamis, global warming, or phenomena on a smaller scale—ice formations on the wings of airplanes, for instance—it is refreshing to read poet Sandra Meek’s Biogeography, an examination of our uncertain relationship with Earth. Biogeography, the 2006 winner of Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize, is concerned with materials, with blood, bone, rock, and steel. As Meek travels between landscapes, she dissolves our notion of the separateness of nature and humanity, of physicality and time. “Quaternary,” the title of the book’s first section, refers to the geologic time period in which humans have existed. By using the name of a time scale defined through stratigraphy, the study of rock layers, Meek establishes the book’s concern with the interconnectivity of time and space. The title of the book’s first poem, “Chronographia,” means a description of time, but the poem starts spatially: “Begin at mile zero.” By her first line, Meek has introduced us to the tension at the heart of Biogeography: the human’s difficult navigation of an unpredictable, ever-changing earth in the context of unyielding time.
Meek writes, “the body’s adrift / in when, saturated with since.” By looking at the rings of a tree, a “fan of veins/ purpling” an ankle, the darker layers of soil that reveal oceans that once covered the continent, Meek shows us that the earth and the human body can act as natural clocks. Her poems have a knowing but never didactic tone as she explores the relationship between nature and the human form. She reminds us of the body’s earthly beauty: a woman’s exploding heart “spill[s] her room // to a startling ruby.” The body is “a clay vase thrown / around an absent fist.” She asks, Are the earth and the human at odds, or are they part of each other? How do they shape each other, imitate each other? Of weather, she writes, “We are its children.” And yet, there is danger in this relationship. Meek envisions an earth that is blindly powerful and a human race that cannot help but be its mirror. Manmade objects imitate those from the sky: “wooden cross / starring the roadside; silver jet trail / expanding as it fades, nderscoring then canceling the clouds’ / inscrutable calligraphy.” And this calligraphy, writing, is also key; language is a code.Words are “landscape, and climatology, the theory / of our eminent end.” The “eminent”/”imminent” pun is crucial. Meek depicts nature’s temperament as both majestic and threatening.
Biogeography’s poems place us on the precipice of disaster even as they celebrate the world. In “Event One,” our violent human history is seen in soil sections: “138 feet, Atlanta / is burning; 2500 feet down, Socrates sips hemlock.” But the buried past isn’t past alone—it’s warning. Meek writes, “What calmed / six thousand years ago stopped // the wandering; cities were born, and alphabets,” but the physical evidence of an instant ice age shows “that lost theory of doom, not global warming’s / slow slippage, but what can calm / can craze again.” Meek believes that nature may owe us nothing.
A loose hierarchy is established: earth, human, technology. Still, all are connected, all spring from the same origin and have power. As Meek describes the mechanics of these relationships, she is concerned with the body’s fragility, how technology can keep us breathing, kill us, become us. A car crash disfigures a woman; doctors “carved the crushed leg // away from her stalled body, which felt its leaving // as an expansion of light.” But in “Coma,” she asks, “What sound does the soul make / leaving the body? And how distinguish it / from the machine’s pump and sigh / from steel / crashing against steel?”
Meek’s language is bold and crashing even as it acknowledges its smallness against infinite time, infinite biological and geologic shifts. She masterfully places the personal against the global, making monumental jumps. In “Om, with Kelp and Crows” the contrast of images is staggering: “A shrimp caught above tide / spirals between rocks, one small // margin of terror. A mountain boils / to the south, readying // to blow.” Amazingly, these disparate images can inhabit the same space. In the world of Biogeography, it isn’t presumptuous to assume that when a skater crushes her wrist by falling on hard ice, that same ice will almost drown a woman who “drags her rescuer /…climbing his body / mid-lake,” or that that ice has a more global power, is the first sign of a climatological shift.
Meek’s exercises in contrast and spatial definition are flat at times (a hummingbird “[dives] into the bay window // demonstrating not sky”) but ultimately forgivable in light of other successes: “What weather taught: milk breath / on the pane meant self.” Meek is at her best when she shows us how to define ourselves through nature. In the book’s third section, she explores the near tectonic force of political and religious violence. “Fort Zeelandia” concerns the December Murders that took place in Suriname, 1982, in which fifteen people were executed for opposing the country’s military regime. As the poet imagines the victims “cut down to symbols of dissent,” she notes how the distance of time and space can appear to erase atastrophe: “Twenty-one years, and no one has answered / for those knocks in the night….What can’t be seen from space: the Great Wall // crumbling, coral reefs / boiling to oblivion.”
The language of Biogeography seamlessly moves between hope and quiet apprehension. In “Chronographia” the poet writes, “the forest floor / littered with possibility, pine needles knit / like wishbones’ twinned arms. / Break one: luck’s what remains / most whole.” A cross section of these packed lines might resemble layers of sediment: the conflicting emotions of these revelations are stacked upon each other, not so that we read pleasure on one line and pain on the next, but pleasure and pain together. These moments of tension are so fragile, so based in that beautiful and subtle doubleness of words, that they risk invisibility. How easily we might miss the dark undercurrent and blame of the phrase “littered with possibility,” but Meek takes the risk. Eventually these tricks of language build to form a thunderous, collective power. The result is a book so deeply textured that it is nearly felt on the skin.
—Jazzy Danziger
Published in Meridian 23 (May 2009).