Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens   
Tebot Bach, 2010. $20

Review by Vivian Wagner

Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens’ book, God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, is a beautiful book, full of visual and poetic images of life and death and everything in between. The book is divided into three sections, with the poems of Foust interspersed with the watercolor artwork of Stevens.

The title suggests religious or spiritual components to this collection, and in fact a spirituality at once dark and hopeful, eternal and entirely modern, is shot through all of the poems. The poems all reflect a concern with the natural world, both in the moment of its continued creation and in the moment of its destruction, particularly as a result of human intervention or carelessness, including pollution, mishandling, and violence toward the natural world.

The first section deals primarily with plants and plant matter: oak trees, poppies, cherries, apples, pomegranates, persimmons. The title poem, “God, Seed,” the first poem in the collection, combines these elements of creation and destruction in a disjointed series of nouns, as in the following lines: “bloom/ womb fruit/blight.”

Sometimes the natural world in these poems is the human body, or the or the environment that is created between two bodies, as in “Now”: “I remember your archipelago spine, nape of knee,/ inner ankle secret spot, instep arch,/places in the body’s uncharted waters….” The body is a part of the world to be explored, navigated, and described with the same attention to detail as any other living thing. And the habitat of that body — “warm/wax and pollen, semen, and slept-in sheets” — is described as if it were any other natural habitat rife with the effects and affects of life, sex, and death.

In some poems, like “Dawn Poppies,” violence and living go hand in hand. This poem opens with a mixed metaphor that denotes this ambivalent space: “When night opens throat/in frog and cricket call.” With the opening throat being at once breaking into song and cutting into skin, letting the blood of life spill onto the canvas of the living moment. On the facing page is an excellent example of how the art perfectly complements and at the same time throws into question the poetry. Five red poppies stand against a swirly green background. In any other context these poppies might seem simply beautiful, not threatening or threatened in any way. But here the blood red of the watercolor takes on extra meaning. It is, as the poem suggests at its ending, “illegal red.” Red that breaks rules and boundaries, crosses from the pulse of life into the acid wash of death.

The next poem, “Cherries,” pushes the red of cherries into yet another direction, toward sexuality: “her lips/are stained red,/her lips are jammed up/next to his thighs/so close she can just/barely part them.” The fullness and abundance of the cherries, juice, and stones open up new meanings for the color red and its multiple undertones.

The second section tends to focus more on animals. It opens with “Unheard,” a poem that interrogates collective nouns for animals. It begins by setting up mythical creatures against real ones: “A marvel of unicorns or/a herd of wild/ bison…” It highlights and calls into question these ways of referring collectively to types or species: an “impossibility of puffins,” a “route of wolves,” working its way to another, more haunting noun: an “extinction of —“ with the type of creature to which this newly-created collective noun refers left open, and thereby possibly referring to all creatures, at some point — continuing the theme that carries throughout this collection of the razor edge between life and death, existence and extinction.

This section has poems on trout, carp, cormorants, bees, and a host of other animals. It also features artwork of these animals, sometimes highlighting and reflecting the narrative of a specific poem, as does the painting of a bird in flight in the crosshairs of a gun, which is on the page facing the poem “Day.” This poem is about a man who shoots magpies he traps in a cage, with a kind of cruel nonchalance: “Asked why, he said because I can.” The shooting of magpies then opens out to a larger environmental disaster spurred by the same impulse: “…when he used Malathion/in that green valley,/every last songbird died/in one light-dappled morning, in one-tenth of a day.” Where a poem like this could be didactic, it is saved and made lyrical by the preciseness of its imagery, by the riddle of its story, and by the beauty of its language.

The following poem, “Bee Fugue,” addresses a similar issue — the destruction and endangerment of animals, this time by pesticide, parasite, or virus that is “infecting the honeybee brain.” It, too, goes beyond this somewhat prosaic concern into the realm of multiple meanings and startlingly precise language in describing the bees and their troubles: “Their thigh sacs are heavy/and ache to draw comb, but/some template’s been changed.” The poem also returns to the ultimate threat of extinction raised by the first poem in this section: “We are enmeshed in our interconnectedness, betrayed/by our genes. This is what extinction means.”

The final section of the volume is a grab bag of natural themes and metaphors, broadening into some of the spiritual concerns of the book as a whole. In the poem “What Follows,” accompanied by a painting called “Serpent,” specifically Judeo-Christian issues are raised, as a way of approaching the life/death, creation/destruction theme that threads through the volume. It ends: “I never even licked/that apple, but my heel still/is stung. With original sin,/ it only begins.”

This is a lovely, haunting volume. The poems and artwork together create a lyrical, engrossing view of the human and natural condition, and they also provide glimpses of the kind of beauty and creativity that might get us out of the conundrum of violence, sin, and destruction.