What the Poet Did: Kavanagh, Part I of II

Basma Kavanagh’s Distillō

(Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2012.)

http://www.basmakavanagh.ca/

In Distillō Basma Kavanagh does an ecocritical reading of Vancouver Island’s wildernesses, using the conventions of science to critique the conclusions of science, and advocating for poetic attention to the environment

Part I of II: Exhausting Science

Basma Kavanagh’s first book, Distillō, presents a collection of closely-attended moments from the rainforests, beaches, and waters of the northern part of Vancouver Island. Her careful observations use the language of meteorology, botany, zoology, and linguistics to lead readers to a mythopoetic relationship with North Island.

            Kavanagh treats rain like a living organism by beginning “Moisture” – the first of Distillō’s four sections – with a long poem entitled “Taxonomy,” (a.k.a. the science of the classification of living and extinct organisms). The poem’s six sections take their subtitles the Latin name of a type of rainfall, a definition, and its frequency: 

http://www.basmakavanagh.ca/

“1.  Distillo inlumino: an illuminating drizzle; uncommon” (15); “6. Pluvia densa: a true rain, heavy and penetrating; common in autumn and winter” (20).  Though the subtitles indicate that “Here Be Science,” the poems themselves depict experience through imagery rather than analysis through observation. For example, in “Pluvia densa” “the ground / weeps: swampy, saturated” and “The great timbers // of the town bridges thud ominously against one another, loose teeth worked / by insistent tongue of river” (20). Throughout Distillō, Kavanagh undermines scientific categorization with lyric description.

            That is not to say she completely eschews rational methodologies. The description in “Perfume: Brown Northern Salmander Ambystoma gracile ssp. gracile” derives from close observation and prior research:

 When fat shadows prod,

they slip from curled leaves,

from humus bearing faint imprints

of their ridged bodies. Slight metallic

scents hand in air, little flags (45)

http://www.basmakavanagh.ca/

The evolution of point of view in this poem draws readers in; the first section calls the salamanders “them,” the second focuses on “he,” the third “she.” But the fourth section uses inclusive pronouns: “Water is our element, not fire.  We slip / into the cool taste of it….” (48). Rather than anthropomorphizing salmanders, Kavanagh salamandorphizes her human readers.

            Most of Kavanagh’s poems place readers in a passive relationship with nature. Section three’s eponymous poem “Unmoon” epitomizes our inertia:

How to unsnow

 the road, unsideswipe

a car, uncoma,

undo.

How to unknow

fatigue, unfind

the lump, unwild

those calls at night… (63)

In an antithesis of scientific method, “Unmoon” – like many poems in the first three sections of Distillō – advocates for undoing prior actions, and rethinking prior approaches to Vancouver’s North Island.