The subtle, magical legerdemain by which, in her new poems, Susan Barba merges subjectivity with the nonhuman has not only aesthetic but also ethical implications. If the current human-generated ecological crisis is predicated on long-held assumptions that human beings (one step down from angels) are distinct from and superior to all else, that we have been granted a “dominion” that leads to our valuing other species and earthly resources primarily as material for our ravenous consumption, Barba’s poems seek to complicate that standpoint.
In the untitled poem beginning “Here she can breathe,” for instance, the pronoun “she” is simultaneously human and nonhuman. We might assume the first line describes a human position. Here, someone can breathe and receive the rain. But the following reference to “tap root /bud burst” suggests that “she” is Earth. The next line — “what is interred in her /lives” — might be as true for a human subject as for a planetary one. Then human perspective is reversed in the final two stanzas. From our point of view, the sky is an opening of space above “our” terrestrial habitat, but for flying birds, openings are prospective landing spaces below. Even the flowers have agency and “look to flowers.” Perhaps the key terms in the last two stanzas are “open” and “opening,” words often used in Buddhism to describe enlightenment. Finally, we note that no word is capitalized or closed by punctuation. The line break paces our perceptions, but there is otherwise no typographical hierarchy among the words.
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