Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2018. 95 pages. $22.00.
What I was today: an apprentice arborist, a plant healthcare technician in training. The trees determined the rules I could follow, what conversations I would have with myself. At six a.m., I treated lawns for nutsedge, sprayed organic insecticides on rhododendrons, killed spider mites on a spruce. All’s death. These small brutalities cater to the perfect landscape, the lawn without weeds, the garden without browning.
As a tick crawled onto my boots, and as I recognized my impulse to smush the bug with my thumb, I thought of Ada Limón’s fifth collection of poems, The Carrying. “I can’t stop / putting plants in the ground. There’s a hunger in me, // a need to watch something grow,” Limón writes in “Sway.” Watching something grow in The Carrying becomes a life-affirming practice—a matter of ethics, an attempt to defy the ubiquitous death which pervades the news cycle, personal lives, as well as the imagination of this reader. Gardens, those cultivated spaces, feel sacred for this very reason. The poet knows another way to reaffirm life is write, to actuate the voices, names, and lives of those that can no longer (or never could) do so themselves. The same poem begins: “What is it about words that make the world / fit easier? Air and time.” Structuring air for her readers through her instrument, the voice, and ordering time for her readers through her rhythmically-complex lines, The Carrying finds life—and the act of creation—even amidst the chaos and violence of death.
A collection divided into three sections, one theme that unifies these sections is the desire to, but the inability to, carry a child. These moments of devastation almost elegize an abstraction, an imagined future. It’s true that the last lyric of the collection recognizes the ways in which cultivating the earth has become synonymous with raising an infant, all between three- and five-beat rhythms:
What would I
do with a kid here? Teach her
to plant, watch her like I do
the lettuce leaves, tenderly, place
her palms in the earth, part her
black hair like planting a seed?
While these poems may carry the earth and a written infant through its pages, the minds of Limón’s poems expand themselves beyond the asceticism of collecting acorns or the associative logic of tree-to-locale: “What if, instead of carrying // a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” These lines from another lyric, “The Vulture & The Body,” ultimately pose a question of spirituality: who in these poems determines what Limón is supposed to carry? Lyrical mysticism, for these poems, becomes the first crust of earth, and the speakers of The Carrying chant the names of animals, objects, and actions in order to organize unknowingness—what Limón calls “this endless plummet into more of the unknown” in “Notes on the Below.”
This structuring and restructuring of the unknown comes in parts both incantatory and remote, as other lines from “The Vulture” follow: “I say something // to myself that’s between a prayer and a curse—how dare we live / on this earth.” A frequent rhetorical mode of these poems asks something implicit to the reader, positioning Limón’s audience within a metaphor rather than outside a book: what isn’t quite a prayer and isn’t quite a curse? While I don’t have an answer, I suspect one might arrive at something like chant. It may be worthwhile to quickly note the lineage of incantation in Western literature, beginning with the Romans and the Greeks, mostly chants in which lyrical voices sing to the earth, pray to local deities for a plentiful harvest, plead for rain. Limón’s lyrics may not plead for rain (or maybe they do), but they most certainly chant to, or actualize, the voice of the earth.
This is because a chant carries with it an imperative, a psychic force through which the poet controls a sort of myth-binding power. In her lyric “The Dead Boy,” Limón chants the name of a young boy who has died in a dorm room. “And because symbols matter, I try / to say his name: Griffin, Griffin,” which is succeeded lines later by another chorus: “he is etched in my mind, named / in language forever and only as: dead boy, / dead boy, and gone.” Part attempt at resurrection, part elegiac lament, these lines return to the source of incantation: the ability to name, to invoke a being through charm. In this case, the chant fails, language abandons the deceased.
Naming, for The Carrying, becomes equivalent to both realization of the conjured, the chanted, as well as realization of the self. The first lyric in the collection, “A Name,” remembers an anti-Miltonic Eve wandering the garden, then giving names to the animals, and in that process still, recalling herself:
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.
Readers may find here a metamorphosis, a trochaic transformation from myth to human in the final two clauses, as if the figure would like to hear her name in a chant. In the process of self-recognition, of Limón giving name to Eve herself, the poet reminds her readers that the natural world not only witnesses everything but has the authority to transmute the self. This may be the source of myth, as the final lines of another lyric, “Wonder Woman,” explain. In this poem, the speaker stands at the edge of a river and follows a “girl, maybe half [her] age” dressed as Wonder Woman:
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
wed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.
What stands out most when comparing these lines from “A Name” and “Wonder Woman”: both mythological figures are positioned against, or within, the natural world, almost like Limón has placed a DC character in Ovid. A garden in which a mythological figure would like to be humanized, a river swell upon which a human becomes myth. From these places, the earth may not always seem to speak back to us when we need a name, a chant—or maybe we aren’t listening correctly, as The Carrying compels me to believe.
“But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full / of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—” This is exactly what Limón accomplishes in this collection, reminding her readers that we are synonymous with all matter while giving life to the figures that have been made abstract by time, circumstance, maybe both. In “Dead Stars,” the poet asks the same question she interrogates throughout the book: “What / would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” There may not be an answer yet, though in these orphic poems, it becomes clear these are questions worth asking and questions worth answering.
