Review of Rust Fish from Bark, the blog of Willow Springs
by Brett Ortler, April 17, 2011
If you took an average group of people on a hike into the woods, started pointing out plants and asked folks to identify them, my assumption is that not many people would do particularly well. This isn’t that surprising; after all, most people (80% give or take) live in urban areas, and not all of nature adjusts particularly well to a biome that consists largely of asphalt, glass, and steel.
On the surface, at least, this general lack of knowledge about the natural world isn’t particularly problematic. Sure, given the wrong circumstances, not knowing about the natural world can get one into trouble-as with the grandmother from a community near mine who made jam from glossy buckthorn berries and ended up in the hospital, or the campers in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area who mistook blue cohosh for blueberries.
Even so, given the rarity of such occurrences one could make an argument that knowledge about the natural world is superfluous, especially when such knowledge can readily be obtained via one of a legion of technological devices.
That argument, however, is wrong, for several reasons.
Before I continue, however, you might be wondering what the hell all this has to do with a collection of poems. In this case, quite a bit. Maya Jewell Zeller’s book, Rust Fish, is steeped in the natural world, and it is replete with references to species of all sorts-skunk cabbage, sphagnum moss, filberts(another name for hazelnuts). Even the title itself refers to nature, specifically to a fossilized fish entombed in a shale deposit outside Bellingham, Washington.
Like individual words, individual species have connotations all their own and entire histories behind them, and if such references are introduced appropriately, you incorporate some of that history and those connotations into the poem. Too often, writers will attempt to strengthen a weak poem’s imagery by introducing slapdash references to the natural world. (I’m looking at you, Brett Eugene Ortler.)
In contrast, Maya’s poems don’t simply allude to the natural world, in a real sense, they stem from it, and I think this is what gives her work such strength and authenticity.
One of the title poems, “I Give You Ten Reasons Why We Can’t Use Roundup on Our Lawn” is a good example of this:
I Give You Ten Reasons Why We Can’t Use Roundup on Our Lawn
1. As a girl the black-branched plums
behind the far fence were mine because
a giant row of nettle and snowberry
blocked them from the cows. I’d lie in a crook
where many limbs came together
and move my tongue along the sticky tip
of a still-hanging fruit.
2. My palms have been stained
again and again
ripe blackberry pink.
I’ve pressed them to T-shirts
like silk-screened bleeding hearts.
3. Your Jesus
is thin, his eyes dark like lake.
He is hungry. Maybe he’ll drink
the milk from these slim green necks.
4. Barbed Wire and Roundup were both
bastard sons of Zeus. They were banished
to America because, as the god himself put it,
they didn’t seem to have any real
mythical potential.
5. Maybe the grass
is a weed. Then what do you exterminate?
6. My first dream of you
was while lying in a field of golden stems.
7. I don’t know how to separate my love
into categorical pros and cons.
8. The lefternmost puff of yellow lies
less than seven feet from where I want
to plant my tomatoes.
9. The back of the bottle reads:
TOXIC. KEEP AWAY
FROM CHILDREN.
10. When you say you want to kill
the dandelions, I cringe.
Plum limbs crack
against the petalled night. Thistles
turn their lavender heads like girls,
whiten and blow cold.
In your eyes I see sprinkler system
installation, stained deck, a mother
in ironed beige pants. Imagine
growing up wild, I say. Lambsweed
is dinner. Pumpkins make bread.
Nasturtiums are honest-faced, edible, and paint
a salad to resemble the sun. Don’t you want
to kneel wet-kneed in this green,
bend close to this yellow flower,
press your lips to it, and pretend
you’re kissing me?
The diction in this poem is absolutely lovely. The words themselves aren’t only perfectly placed, they sound and feel wonderful. In this poem alone we are treated to nasturtiums, lambsweed, snowberry. Nevertheless, too often when poets write about the natural world (or even incorporate it often) they are (disparagingly) labeled “regional” poets or “nature poets.” But Maya’s references to the natural world don’t make her a provincial writer or a rural poet; on the contrary, they simply are evidence of her skill as a writer, as what she has accomplished is impressive.
“Kelp Noise” is a good example of this:
Kelp Noise
I kept a stuffed snake
in my bed against Mother’s wishes.
She hated that snake,
its four feet of tri-colored fuzz,
the red-white-and-blue of it, striped fur
that turned gray with the grime
of a child. Looped once, twice,
around my leg while I napped, he made me
feel safe. Coiled in ache. Primal as rock.
As if he could mate and make snakes
come alive. When I had mono
Mother threw my snake in the trash,
but I found him, I fished him out,
rubbed dust off his eyes. Let the onyx
beads gaze back at me again and I sang
him a lullaby, welcome-back, welcome-back
Snake. That night I walked
to the garden where Mother chopped kelp
into pieces to richen the dirt. Moon gleamed
off the olive skin sheen of the kelp,
flashed blue as the tail of my snake,
crimson like his head and I thought it was him
all bitten in pieces, white polyester
spilling out across beets. I smelled salt-drift
in darkness and knew he’d been packed
with the ocean-foam, knew he had lost
his brine on this plot, lost it to froth
full of bugs sliming dirt and the rubbery
flesh of the kelp-tangled net
and the hole-pocked floats
from boats gone down.
That’s another thing I like about this book: the poems are accessible. Accessibility is wonderful, but it’s a slippery slope of sorts-accessible is just down the road from folksy, which is right next door to maudlin. Thankfully, Rust Fish is accessible without being saccharine or simple; it offers insights without affectation, and the entire collection brims with depth and meaning.