Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books, 2018. 149 pages. $17.95.
From the ashes of war, human remains, 9/11, and the clear cutting of America’s once-expansive Eastern forests, Allison Cobb creates Green-Wood: a cultural biography of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a historic landmark founded in 1838. The book contains three sections comprised of essay-like prose poems scattered with bits of verse and white space. Cobb begins:
The first year I didn’t set foot inside the cemetery. The still smoking hole
across the water held my attention, a smell curling inside the minds of
the million-headed city, even in sleep.a weather breath resurrects
The speaker eventually enters the cemetery, and, like her predecessor “Nehemiah Cleaveland, Green-Wood enthusiast and original historian, sprung from the root of ‘to see,’” constructs a history. Her history is one of connections, contradictions, collage, word-webs, narratives and borrowed text gleaned from rigorous research, field notes and personal experience.
Nightboat Books’s Green-Wood is a re-release. The original was published in 2010 by the small Queens-based press Factory School. In the intervening years, environmental poetry has continued its metamorphosis from the divine celebration of static nature to a skeptical hermeneutical process that addresses a shifting landscape imbued with contemporary ecological concerns like species decline, deforestation, climate change, and pollution. Further, Brian Teare, in his introduction to this new edition of Green-Wood, describes how ecopoetics approaches language, a key aspect of Cobb’s project:
postmodern ecopoetics departs from more representational iterations of environmental writing in the fierce scrutiny it brings to bear upon language itself, and especially the way it borrows from avant-garde poetics a critical eye quick to see the anthropocentric and imperialist ideologies hidden in traditional literary language.
In the first of the book’s three sections, titled “The Question of a Name,” Cobb introduces the reader to many of her principal themes and writing devices: 9/11 “the still smoking hole across the water;” etymology “Lucky, ‘a word of mysterious origin.’ Lucky, we all said, that we came up from the subway after the planes hit but before the buildings weakened enough to collapse”; her daily walks and field notes “the egret stands perfectly still, tilted out over the water. It has hardly a head, just eyes and beak—honed across seven million years into a living point”; and conflicting attitudes towards nature, first exemplified in the origins of Green-Wood cemetery “the first American cemetery described as ‘rural,’” and “a sanitized version of the natural world and obscured among the glancing foliage the decaying human body, itself a wilderness.”
She also writes about destruction. The destruction of human bodies (“bones had to be dug up to make room for new bodies”), animals (“government officials oil eggs, smash nests and shoot cormorants”), and land (“the vast pine stands of the Ohio Valley about to fall to the saw”).
In “Question of a Name,” Cobb immerses the reader in the microcosm of Green-Wood, and subsequently the speaker’s microcosm, and both represent the greater world and its violence, curiosities, and origins in miniature. She employs the cemetery—named Green-Wood, wood recently cut and not yet dry or seasoned—to serve as the fulcrum for her tentacular investigations into the human condition through history and language. The cemetery is a sleeping place for the dead not the living, but Cobb writes:
I slept
I slept. Walking for a year. A confined slice. I wrote nothing, read nothing
about the place. I meant to disappear, but it kept offering its face to read,
a text with blanks and bits of floating free, death
The cemetery, a place of death and “sleep,” wakes the speaker up and implores her to re-engage with the place around her, even if that space is comprised of a “happy birthday / in heaven balloon wrecked / on a branch” and “berry-clotted” animal shit “by the shore / of Sylvan Water.”
The next two sections travel farther afield from the cemetery. In “The Fence” she contemplates enclosures: “Aesthetically considered, all fences are mere intrusions, and to a certain extent, deformities”; and war: “I walk against the backdrop of war, the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue.” The speaker investigates beliefs about private versus public property: “Property ownership served as a mark of personal virtue,” and “Lewis Cass . . . the man in charge of Indian Removal . . . drew his justification for the policy from Genesis: Native Americans merely traversed the land without subduing it.” Both notions are false but are woven into America’s founding stories; Cobb’s work exposes and confronts these myths.
In “The Fence” she also starts listing; at first she only lists Green-Wood tree species:
Catalpa
Kentucky coffee tree
Inkberry
Spreading English yew
Judas-tree
Maidenhair
Canada hemlock
These lists build compelling juxtapositions between what comes before “human seeds sprouting stones” and what comes after “Rune means ‘secret, a darkness.’” Seed, stone, tree, secret. Cobb then moves on to two separate but related stories about first the Norse god Odin piercing himself to the “windy world tree” and to the Lakota “tying themselves to a scared tree with ropes or strips of leather pierced through the skin of their chests” to “gain proximity to god.”
Later, in addition to tree lists, she lists items left by graves. These she always places at the bottom of the page, like a headstone, with an expanse of white space above.
heart pillow wrapped in a plastic grocery bag
smiling cop with one arm broken off
Hello Kitty sticker that says smartfit
knock-kneed mummy with green teeth
Puerto Rican flag fuzzy dice
wrestling Dalmatian puppies figurine
merry christmas in heaven ribbon
In the third and final section, “The Foreign Birds,” Cobb opens with the etymology of “ghost: The sense of the pre-Teutonic *ghoizdo-z should be ‘fury, anger,’” and concludes the section and the book with a dramatic and powerful climatic shift in form and tone.
Between these bookends, Cobb again extends outward from the themes of the cemetery in “The Question of a Name.” Women’s bodies and Emerson’s fascination with France’s Cabinet of Natural History dominate her prose. She writes about pregnancy “the word ‘pregnant’ was taboo in written English until the sixteenth century. Euphemisms include ‘poisoned’ (in reference to the swelling),” and the speaker’s struggle with infertility “On Clomid I produce ten eggs at once and a large cyst, so the doctor won’t inseminate. He tells me to come back in a few months.”
Instead of trees or grave items, in this section she lists pesticides:
Daybreak
Deadsure
Dead-Fast
Dead eye
Deadline
Deep Woods
A relationship is implied between pesticides and infertility. “I change directions, but every turn reveals another guy with hose spewing yellow poison.”
She writes about the birds of paradise (remember her title “The Foreign Birds”) in New Guinea that scientists initially know only from their skins, not from their living bodies. Russell Wallace, the nineteenth-century naturalist, attempts to capture live specimens and bring them back to England, but the birds mostly die “he wrote, on the morning of the third day they were almost always found dead at the bottom of the cage, without any apparent cause.” The scale of violence Cobb portrays in her work, which humans have exacted on the natural world and one another, is painful to encounter.
The Kaluli believe that women who mourn the dead turn into birds. Their lament cries echo calls from the surrounding forest, expressing loss beyond the resources of talk.
a dry sea, fragile
from “to cut with a sharp point”
Birds, pregnancy, women’s bodies, infertility, grief—public and private, death, flowers and poison are all linked in her extrapolations. There is so much contained in these pages, to pull one thread is to weave or unravel the whole fabric.
