a small practitioner of earth
This Week in Reading:
Hyperboreal by Joan Naviyuk Kane
I read this book and thought it would be about Alaska, and it was, but it also wasn’t the way I would have described Alaska. Or rather, I have spent the year since I left Alaska trying to find the right words to describe it, and I read this book hoping that Joan Naviyuk Kane would have already written them down for me. It is probably an unreasonable demand, for someone else to be able to articulate your own experience, and this book of poetry did not do it, but it did articulate her own version of Alaska in a way that was concise and deft and beautiful.
To me, the collection is about inevitability. About things so big that they seem set on their own course. It made me feel like when I am very sad, and I go out into the wilderness, and I’m still sad, but the mountains and the desert and the ocean are so large that my sadness seems like it makes sense. Faced with the enormity of the world, my sadness feels justifiable in a way that it doesn’t when I miserable in my own bedroom. That isn’t what the book is about, but that is what it feels like.
She writes:
"Called to the ditches alongside the mine roads,
A continuation of things we do wrong"
I don’t believe in destiny, but I do believe inevitability. Even after the most unlikely of events, I just think of course, of course this is how it all ended up. I might not have been able to see it coming, but now that it is here, it seems impossible that it could have happened any other way. The poems are about way the thrum of time moving unflinchingly along is comforting when you don’t think about it, and terrifying and infuriating when you do. It is the sound of a train in a tunnel, far away, the weight of a very heavy winter coat against a bare shoulder. I guess what I mean to say, is that these poems feel solid; they are written in a way that doesn’t feel open for questioning.
The poems themselves feel this inevitable. Of course these words had to fit together in this order, thank goodness someone had found them like this, transcribed them onto paper, published them into this very slim volume. Quite simply, they exist in the only way they could possibly exist.
She writes:
“In the totality of sleep
We dream together.”
She writes:
"What I mean to say is,
I am not sure I will ever
become the person
I had hoped, or forgive
myself the inaccuracy
of estimation."
I feel like I am circling around these poems to describe them. Each poem feels like a closed system, there is little I can say that adds to it. They feel so complete, like a surprisingly heavy pebble, or a pistachio, or a perfect fish skeleton washed up on the beach, cleaned by the ocean. Does that make sense?
This poetry collection felt so whole that I almost didn’t write this at all, but the book is very very good, and I want you to read it, so this is my best attempt.
Further Reading:
Reading poetry is so fast and grounding, and makes for a great palette cleanser between denser things on your reading list.
Mary Oliver is one of the only writers that writes about nature in a way that isn't cheesy and lame. Her poems tug at something deep down inside of me. This one is my favorite.
I think about Valediction Forbidding Mourning by Adrienne Rich, like, at least once a week.
I read the that 700 page volume of Louise Glück's collected work last summer, and it was really fascinating to see her writing evolve over the course of her life. This poem was one of my favorites.