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

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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).

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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.

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: 

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“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)

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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.