What the Poet Did: Kavanagh, Part II of II

Basma Kavanagh’s Distillō

(Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2012.)

In Distillō Basma Kavanagh does an ecocritical reading of Vancouver Island’s wildernesses, using the conventions of science to critique the conclusions of science.

Part II of II: Sustaining Nature

http://www.basmakavanagh.ca/

Part I showed how the first three sections of Distillō conceptually undo the very science that informs them. However, section four – “Abandon” – directly engages with the complexity of technological incursions in wilderness. For example, “Resource Extraction” reads in its entirety:

That phrase –

painful as a pulled tooth,

hot yank and burn, ache

of live root torn

from shocked gum. (74)

            “Resource Extraction” sets readers up for the longer polyvocal poem “Alter Altar” (76-78) which intersperses pastoral descriptions of regrowth after clear cut, with two voices – the first a pro-logging advocate, and the second a pro-old-growth advocate:

Silence falls on this altar of after;

after the men have left with their machines,

a breeze cools the rough wound, soothes,

the wind eye cut into the forest (76). 

That the pro-old-growth voice consistently gets the last word, and that the very last words  of the poem are “a field of trees is not a forest” (78) indicates that Kavanagh, like Tim Lilburn, recognizes that “there is something wrong if an agricultural perspective becomes the only way to see the landscape” (Calder xii).

            The final long poem “Island” (84-90), states:

I lean into the task of listening

that is also, somehow, asking

the island answers with silence.

I tally negative space, the unspoken…” (87)

Kavanagh faces silence and finds a tonic based on sympathetic magic: in her tally she decides to

subtract family, add,

add rain and anxiety,

refugia, transience,

abundance, beloved,

stir, tilt your head

bring this drench

to your mouth –

drink it down” (87).

http://www.basmakavanagh.ca/

Thus bolused, she listens to the tide’s “energetic slant of water” and the “Tiny tinny percussion of barnacles / snapping shut against dryness, / lurch and squirt of clams” (89), finding in these sounds the “Ache of how it all fits together / air, water, forest / create spaces perfect for your body, mine” (90). Ultimately, Kavanagh’s listening eschews the rational structures of science for untrammelled emotional response.

            Kavanagh's poems exploit the scientific structures that underlie the commercial rituals of silviculture to recommend replacing them with poetic rituals.  According to Alison Calder, Tim Lilburn “calls for a kind of ‘poetic attention’ that seeks not to appropriate the world but to stand alongside it” (ix); in DistillōBasma Kavanagh answers that call.

Works Cited

Calder, Alison. “Introduction.” Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn.” Ed. Alison Calder. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. vii-xiii.

Kavanagh, Basma. Distillō. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2012. Print.

Kavanagh, Basma.  Images from http://www.basmakavanagh.ca. Accessed May 5, 2014. Paintings are by Kavanagh.

Levin, Jonathan. “Beyond Nature? Recent Work in Ecocriticism” Contemporary Literature. 43:1 (2002). 171-86.