Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2019. 64 pages. $14.95.
Lindsay Lusby’s Catechesis immediately thrusts the reader into the new landscape of the post-pastoral. This designation on the cover serves as our last warning before we enter a space that we may not be able to escape. Gone are the wheat fields of the pastoral where we once would contemplate beauty; they are now rotting away to feed a new site. Lusby plunges us deep into this dark forest, a wild space where trees, plants, roots, leaves threaten. The collection opens with “Girl with No Hands,” a poem that begins with
Her own father mistook her for an apple tree,
full-trunked and red-cheeked.
So he hacked at limbs,
a bedlam of branches and hands.
Unlike pastoral plains where we might contemplate the innocence of rural landscape, here Lusby anoints us among the dark flora where violent and gripping scenes nourish each other. We cannot help but venture deeper into the forest that is both toxic and intoxicating.
Lusby populates her forest with lush collages carefully pieced together from anatomical diagrams, plant images, and text fragments interspersed between the poems. Here we get visceral images, as if Lusby herself has dipped into the forest to collect materials, tear them apart, and graft them back together in a haunting process also at work in her poetry. The collage “lady’s thumb / plate 45” depicts a Lady’s Thumb flower, whereupon the photograph of a bone conjoins a stem. On the opposite page, Lusby writes,
We will know him by
the bodies of his work: an arm unsleeved of skin,
and another,
a blouse split up the back
like a ladybird.
The same hand that grafts human and plant is at work in combining fairytale characters alongside references to movies such as The Silence of the Lambs and Alien. As we wind our way through the forest as a site of un-making and remaking, we, too, gather these pieces that flitter in and out. As we read, we are “drifting deeper into thicket / into lost-track.”
Lusby’s arrangement of poems on the page is integral to reading this collection. In a similar move to her collages, the poems spill from one line to another and the enjambment keeps us hanging on until we get the next lush detail. Our eyes move from one stanza to the next, uncertain where on the page the next line will begin. We replicate the very motion of the characters in the poems that “Give chase / and she moves like a scattershot / constellates over marsh”: We, too, are left lingering within the space of the poem, chasing the characters, propelled by the excitement of what could happen next and the dread that the end crawls near.
The atmosphere of this collection is just as important as the forest in which it takes place. We can feel the resonances of Grimms’ Fairy Tales as a familiar thread that connects the poems. But familiarity quickly gives way to ruin. In “Interlude,” we are presented with what might be a poetic metaphor:
A girl has two choices:
to be a tree or
to be the forest
but then we tumble into a choice between two demises:
If she has no hands,
she will go headfirst:by the skin of her teeth,
by the point of her chin,sharpening as she runs.
If she follows that beating black bird,
she will tangle herself in understory,in those quiet degrees of shade.
These warped conditionals, these fairytale stakes, are thrust into the spotlight. Familiar and precarious moments continue as we meet characters such as the “the girl with cloven feet,” carnivorous plants, the monsters that lurk in the shadows. As we move through the work, we reacquaint ourselves with the feeling that we have visited this forest before, or at least its twisted logic and the danger that lurks. Through grafting disparate elements in her poems and collages, Lusby makes a catechesis that exposes its very seams; this book of rules will not guide us to salvation, but send us deeper into the forest, into want, hunger, and danger.
Lusby’s collection also rewrites familiar female characters in a captivating way, an act that could only be done in the post-pastoral forest. In one poem, we receive more twisted fairytale logic through the voice of the father:
If you love me,
you will leaf and bud.
If you love me, you will ripen.
We know that the girl cannot physically sprout leaves, but the rhythm is enchanting and we cannot help but watch as she must face such impossibilities. The collection goes on to divide into five sections: “Lamb of Law” and “The Dragon” where we again are confronted with the distorted rules that we must absorb and the archetypal monster of the dragon, respectively. Much like a fairy tale, we get the magical number of three sections with the same title as “Woman of the Apocalypse,” two of which bookend the collection and one that appears in the very middle. In these three sections, we return again and again to the figure of the girl in the forest, the girl we know from fairy tales, but with each iteration, we dig deeper into her layers. We discover
Inside its mouth,
another mouth:
a fearful symmetry that rips
through every soft-bellied thing.
In one series, we are presented with another character, the “Girl who Gave Birth to an Apple.” Lusby rewrites this girl over again, beginning, “Some might call it a miracle: / this immaculate fruit dropping / from her womb.” But the miracle twists and in the next poem, “The girl who gave birth to an apple / cradles the aftermath” and in the next, “The girl who gave birth to an apple / is a mother half-full, / is a girl half-empty” then becomes “The girl who gave birth to an apple / is a bird-broken window, / is a seam snagged open.” Using the same language to open one poem after another, Lusby lulls us into a dreamlike state as we are forced to bear witness to brutal destruction.
To situate Lusby’s poems in a broader conversation about ecopoetics might tempt us to read the forest as an idyllic force of nature; perhaps the site fights against human destruction, which is what makes it dark. But Lusby’s forest is deeply intertwined with suffering as a source of nourishment, as the two feed each other in a perpetuating loop. At a time when the survival of the Earth hangs in question, Lusby dares to ask: do we also save the forest, the site of atrocities, the site of painful rewriting, the site of darkness? Much like the impossible choices we get throughout the collection, we have no real choice. We can only sneak deeper into the intoxicating forest, “The sink-swell / of this drowning ground, / a reckoning.”