Bestiary dark

Written with unabashed awe, the bristling 11th collection by Boruch (The Anti-Grief) describes her experiences on a Fulbright Fellowship in Australia in 2019. Inspired by Pliny the Elder's Natural History Encyclopedia, which was written from "his collecting, recollecting/ every blur and fine point" of the natural world in 77 CE, the collection is divided into five "books." Boruch's enthusiasm for the animal world is evident: "OMG, the native welcome swallows swoop for insects," she writes, with palpable excitement. She describes an unforgettable image of a pelican's throat lit up in the sun, the silhouette of fish thrashing inside, and elsewhere admits her ignorance: "I understand, I said to the Indigenous Elder. No you don't, he said." Boruch keeps her touch light and selfdeprecating as the world that the poems describe disappears, or has already been destroyed by the bush fires that killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals shortly after her time there. The Great Barrier Reef is "still gorgeous except those places of die-off/ quiet gray out." But she believes that to "recollect is to rescue,/ to invite back the plain astonishments." These poems offer delights and fascinations at every turn. (Oct.)

How The Eucalyptus drops bark all fall into winter, those quarrels of small birds there, more of the Archangel's ambition Trees lined the road into the Outback, the usual Eucalyptus jerked every which way winter ache does, huge branches dropping bark, crooked strips as if the night before a drug war, a fight, a drunken frenzy. All of it to the ground. Beyond the paddocks the quarrels of a few small birds. Not even cockatoos hung around in their noisy usual. But tell me, I'd look grand as a cockatoo, right? That was the Archangel in my ear, ad nauseum. Want is want, whatever feathered shape it is. At the rest-stop someone left a measured pile of stones, a meaning. Of Pliny's rain of blood and milk, the Wombat left there in the road Pliny. I almost believe what he claimed about battles-- that it rained not fire but blood and milk, even wool. Also straight from the sky, iron in the shape of sponges, baked bricks, the sound trumpets make, their sudden out of nowhere-- The bestiary's dark afloat first in the brain as a wombat hit by a car, swollen in weeds because death is busy with its new commitments to foul gases, to the tiny break-down bacteria that takes any flesh and turns it to ether and earth. Battle of climate or plague-- up there that wool or milk. Imagine blood coming down again, iron too, seemingly in the guise of soft, a sea creature pleasured and adrift, no great waters in sight, or scent. Of Spirits released by fire and fear, and how "never" gets locked in a word Spirits released by fire and fear, freed of their bodies to rise from ash and soot where they dropped or were caught by the burning groves, Koalas and Kangaroos, ancient orders of Wallabies, Skinks and Lizards, the hidden wealth of no-where-else cherished mammals and reptiles, the perennial question mark of Platypus so weirdly bits-of-both plus bird.... As for the solitary Wallaroos, they too out of their flesh and blood in some kind of between-world not like a dream or a bardo, not like anything I could humanly tell you. But their shapes must be gauzy and strange, a thought, really a second thought circling the charred toothy sticks that used to be trees, circling slow, the way medieval artisans took their time to cut into wood and ink up for their bestiaries, liking to monster them a little, add an extra leg or head to those creatures, yet another scare to the other grim wonders of their time and time again. The hand goes looser and rogue drawing a thing never seen though the claims were real enough, gone whimsical, cartoonish to us who demand exactitude and always how many left on the planet and why oh why is that. Our why falls from the sky in embers to spot-fire any grassy place close, is lightning that strikes from smoke disguised as clouds over the no-rain bush or the city making its own weather, is Eucalyptus oil in the leaves sparking the next tree to tree to tree. Or it's secret and lethal as air = gas, our carbon, our fault toward the long gone. A poet in Canberra emailed--the poems should indeed be dark; so many animals.... At least three billion into ash and charred bone, numbed hectare on hectare of blackened gum tree leaves, ruined waterways. I despair, a last sentence as she slipped off-screen. Then to find it, from the Old French despeare, that added de--an emphatic reversal of sperare, "to hope." Despair. The word has a history and I'm wrong, no afterlife in it. Howbeit Past or Future on a library disc ("Daily Life in the Ancient World," Lecture 5) in the glove compartment, the car totaled Is the Past what's left in the glove compartment of a totaled car? Disc five there once, the library lectures-on-tape (Daily Life in the Ancient World) however fog-socked-in shattered day of arrival. But arrival: that would be the Present waiting for a Future to soothe and clean up after spills, the bloody broken moving parts. What a mess. Poetry. Just a lot of questions answered the dumb way, the muddy hard way via the silence it comes from, the mirror that reverses and breaks when you stare into it, the camera that won't click right anymore. Be careful what you predict, poet, what you hang on to like a prophet does. Be careful of that ever-distant dot on the horizon in you as you walk into fire and flood. Excerpted from Bestiary Dark by Marianne Boruch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.