Doomstead days

"To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion." This quote from John Ashbery's "Houseboat Days" anchors Teare's latest volume, a book about climate change, apocalypse and grief, but also a book Teare composed while walking. In wandering, his poems deliberately cultivate attentiveness to the motions of mind. Unfurling, in poem after poem, Teare's long hikes range from California and the Point Reyes coastline to Philadelphia, where he now teaches at Temple University. They are alternately rural and urban, tender and apocalyptic, written in the face of oil spills and also under a "raptor's / accurate shadow / falling over me always / premonitory." Teare's forms often jag across the page, capturing an essayistic consciousness in staggered strokes of thought. The poems feel solitary but intimate: Teare's voices let us weigh the insoluble questions of how to live as an ethical being in the face of violence and environmental collapse. Seduced by beauty, also suspicious of beauty, these poems note "bioaccumulants / & synergistic / toxins stored in fat / in the liver & kidneys," and "day laborers sick / from the exposure," but also revel in "the white lily, / at its dramatic anthers, / how orange dark pollen, / large-grained, falls, stipples." Panicking, also releasing panic, his verse finds refuge, momentarily, at "the thinnest brink" where, "thinking on thinking, / the current pulses."

Lambda Literary Award winner Teare (The Room Where I Was Born) here delivers apocalyptic visions about gross environmental abuse: "Extinction follows us/ whether we mean it to or not/ We are the point/ the lever turns into/ a fulcrum: by wounding/ the world we lift ourselves/ up." Throughout, the poet shows that environmental degradation and the drainage of life in the natural world can tear apart the fabric of life itself. Teare's precise depiction of events, objects, and flora and fauna is dense with a haunting graphicity: "Awake/ sick bats use up winter/ fat stores & starve, thinned wings/ torn, riddles with lesion." He roams the landscape, documenting rivers, lands, streets, and coasts threatened with the shadow of bareness and hence cloaked with fear, rendering the environmental crisis with piercing imageries grounded on solid factual data and personal observation. Treating environmental issues such as oil spills, pollution, industrial toxins, forest fires, and more, he infuses his melancholic tone with strong conscious calls. VERDICT These lyrical and evocative poems highlight the tentative interdependency between the natural and human worlds. Recommended for all poetry readers, especially those interested in ecopoetry.-Sadiq Alkoriji, Broward Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.