Nature Poets

It’s quite fitting that I post these thoughts about the nature and place poems as I sit watching the rain. I grew up thinking that one element of poetry was nature. It seemed like most of what I read in K-12 classes was about nature or some form of it – nature’s cleansing (hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms), one specific element of nature (flowers, leaves, trees, roses, etc.) or the transformation of our lives as seen through the lens of nature. So naturally, it was engrained in my mind that poetry should include a conversation or statement about nature.

While I have clearly been exposed to more than nature poetry at this point in my life, I can still say that reading the poems in the Effigies collection really reminded me how beautiful nature poetry can be when done well.

If I may, I want to stray from an “academic” response to these poems and simply speak from the raw emotion I felt as I read them. First, there was McDougall’s assortment. With lines like:

“the dark time of sickness”

“the bitter waters drunk”

“before the metallic salt of blood”

“that blood was not enough to hold her / from the kind of love that opened and closed / like a flower caught between day and night.”

“knowing our father’s tears, yet deeming them / unremarkable”

“I am still the clean one. No one has to know.”

I awe at the image of Po – a female deity – the source of all life – as she “birthed islands.”

The poem Haloa Naka really stays with me long after I have read and studied it. A homage to the taro root, but beautiful without knowing what plant it references. “I take you in as you are—/the taste of earth and light,/ salt-wind sieved through valley rains.”

Then there is, The History of this Place, one of my favorites. Simple in language, yet complex and layered in meaning and emotion – “dark and heavy / like a broth strained from the living.” Yes, that line is heavy like the poem’s ability to deal with history and place and memories in such a small amount of words – maximum impact, minimal words.

How I Learned to Write My Name is one of my favorites from this section. I’m not Hawaiian, but my name is, and I can connect to the memory of dots at the top of my paper to guide me in writing the letters K-I-A-L-A. I can connect to the shared emotion of a mother and a father who didn’t seem to exist on the same page and to the idea that my name in all caps was me yelling to be noticed, to be heard, to be seen. The lines, “my young hands threading dots into letters, / the fullness of my name, it’s shape, shouting” pull me into the speaker’s life and simultaneously reminds me of many moments from my childhood. Equally, the poem Emma, 1993 could have easily been about me and my mother and the wonderings of an 8 year old daughter who doesn’t understand how her love is not enough.

McDougall takes place and nature and turns it inside out by weaving the speaker’s story in with the story of the Island and the plants that inhabit it and the many deities that protect it. . I didn’t see the same attention to nature in the poems from Totems. While I appreciated many of those poems, none of them spoke to me the way McDougall’s poems did.

The voice of nature in these pieces reminded me of many of the poems from Patricia Smith’s book Blood Dazzler. Smith’s use of personification moves that book in a special direction and now, in my mind, opens a dialogue between an African America female writer and a writer of Kanaka Maoli descent.

I'm curious how others sat with the poems from Totems, Effigies, Wind Shifts, and AAP -- in one sitting back to back or did you experience them at different times? I sat with them in a random order based on which book I could take with me on the bus or BART without too much fuss. This gave me a really scattered reading of the pieces and may account for some of the disconnect I felt as I read the pieces from Totems in relation to the ones from the Pacific Island poets, the Latino poets, and the Asian American Poets (clearly Totems get read at home because it is the heaviest).

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Kiala