Watching Over Creation

 

 

Published by Blue Light Press, November 2020

      Paper  $18.95

 

 

Reviewed by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Lucille Lang Day is a many faceted poet—at once worldly and soulful, scientific and magical, political and personal, a story–teller and a lyricist. She can be serious, humorous, down to earth and ecstatic. The Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place— her most recent book—is divided into two sections. In the first, Foreigner, we travel with Day and her husband in Latin America—Mexico, Costa Rica, The Galapagos—and to Europe— Greece, France, Spain, Holland, Italy. A stranger in these worlds, she uses her capacity for precise observation mingled with sensual pleasure, empathy and visionary illuminations to make lucid word portraits of faraway places. Having been to some of the places she portrays, particularly San Pancho, I can tell you that she catches the soul of that sweet little town by the sea in the title poem, as, just after sunset, the egrets rise on their great white wings and settle in the coconut palms.

The second section, Between the Two Shining Seas, is a more conflicted endeavor, exploring the sense of place in our own land, haunted as America is by the theft of indigenous homelands, and the genocide that underlies our history. Some years ago Day learned that she has Indian ancestors from the Wampanoag tribe in the North East; this knowledge has strongly influenced her recent work. This section opens with a long list poem, which names the states of America, exploring their etymology. Most are of Indian origin. What emerges out of this slow, methodical naming is a devastating portrait of the decimation of Indian tribes, lands, customs and languages. Two examples:

Indiana, Land of the Indians—the Delaware, Piankashaw,
Kickapoo, Wea, Shawnee, Miami and Potawatomi—who
mostly removed by 1846
 
Kansas, the Dakota word for the South Wind People, whose last
fluent speaker of the Kansa Language died in 1983

I’ve been following Day’s writing for two decades and never cease to be delighted by how her poetry expands its range and deepens its emotional reach. Her background is in science, she has a doctorate in science/mathematics education. She’s always been a wonderful storyteller with a biologist’s eye for the right detail and ear for appropriate nomenclature. She’s always been funny and self–revealing. But in recent books she has developed a profound voice, which does not fear to enter the realm of the mysteries, the provinces of unbearable grief, or the wild leaps of her own imagination which can turn a poem about the birds in San Pancho into an unexpected and soulful prayer to join those egrets as they rise into the branches of the coconut trees after sunset.

                        Oh, to sit up there too—
safe, having eaten my fill—with
folded wings, watching over creation.
 

“It Matters”

 The opening poem in the book, written in San Miguel de Allende, uses anaphora and listing to powerful effect. Written in concise unrhymed tercets, the short lines give us the sky at dawn, the flowers, the jacaranda leaves and the bells of La Parroquia. We could be watching a movie, when suddenly, in the sixth stanza, the poem makes a turn into personal reminiscence:

that even here I remember
my father’s laugh and the weight
of my mother’s disappointments

In Day’s world things matter. This stanza follows two about a gnarled woman beggar. Both the beggar and the memory of her parents matter. The latter stanza lasts for just a few breaths and we are off to a lyrical description of the stars which “burn through the sky’s dark cloth/no matter what I call them.” The poem’s speaker seems to be arguing with her scientific self in favor of metaphorical knowing. In the following stanza Day’s humor shows up as she leaps from considering how delicious the prickly pear cacti are, to the Big Bang theory, which “defies/common sense and intuition.” The poem follows the movement of her mind as the speaker considers how science understands the origins of the universe, while her down to earth self argues that it makes no sense. It matters what science says, but it also matters what common sense says. The poem ends with a prayer for:

                        the boy playing
with a stick outside La Casa Rosada;
 
that he never have to hold a gun
and the bells always reach his ears,
pulsing through clear morning air.

This vivid poem sets us up for many of the pleasures of Day’s poetry in this volume. Though Day often writes free verse, she also plays with form. I counted three formal sonnets. She uses stanzas, anaphora and listing in a formal way—a way to structure her poems. In this poem the title phrase, “It Matters,” is repeated soto voce, giving us a string to gather in one glowing necklace all the diverse jewels of what matters in this moment, to this foreigner in San Miguel de Allende.

Day can make deep dives into the personal, the tragic, the unbearable, as in the poem “Hologram” which moves seamlessly from her daughter’s appearance in a dream, in which the poem’s speaker has to remember that her daughter is dead, to her memories of her child as a toddler, to the murmuring of the sea she hears from her B & B in San Pancho, to memories of “all the long months of chemo…,” how she held onto her daughter’s hand, and urged her to “Hang onto hope, as though my love could/ scratch a diamond or hold back the night.” Diamonds are important in Day’s inner world. In the final poem of this collection, the journey is summed up as “a sack of diamonds.”

Over and over Day proves herself a master of endings that gather up the complexity of a poem and tie it together in an elegant knot. Often her humor is her brilliance, as in “Inauguration Day in the Galapagos,” in which the speaker takes an excursion to see giant tortoises, or goes off to visit “dark marine iguanas” and sea lions, rather than join the herd watching the inauguration. One word in the powerful ending opens up the political point being made: “and the insistent/surge of the imperiled, luminous sea.” Day is a passionate environmentalist. She has co-edited a remarkable anthology, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. In this part of her journey her concerns about climate change become overt, as in a poem named “Global Warming in the Galapagos, in which she wonders what will happen:

Without the trees, where will red–
footed boobies with blue beaks
build nests…? 

Day cares about red–footed boobies being able to build their nests; she cares that the boy playing with a stick never have to hold a gun; she cares about remembering her dead daughter as a mischievous toddler, cares that the sea is imperiled and luminous, cares that creation continue its beauty and intelligence. Reading Day, we feel how profoundly, it matters.

 

The Old Gods are Gone

In Europe Day delights in wonderful meals, and swims in myth. “Dining Alone in Athens” begins with “sea bass wrapped in vine leaves, served/ with white wine sauce and olives” but moves swiftly into the realm of the old gods, the “Temple of Zeus on the field below,” and Athena who “planted the first olive tree here/in a contest against Poseidon, whose magic/was seawater.” She sums up the loss of the gods, who have retreated to museums, in a few rueful lines, but closes her poem with the story of the goddess, who planted that tree of whose fruit Day has just eaten, and “holds her own against the sea.” Athena still lives in poetry. Day has a way of bringing the ancient world to life. In many poems she visits museums and rescues the ancients. A nineteenth–century shaman, in a glass case in a museum in Paris, begins to stamp and drum in “Evenk Shaman’s Costume.”

Let there be magic! A dance
in a sacred grove, to cast evil spirits
from bodies, retrieve stolen souls. 

Poetry, in Day’s devoted practice, often turns magical. This is especially true in her ekphrastic poems—inspired by art. In “Dinner in Barcelona” a delectable description of a meal is followed by a transformative experience of the arts:

Gaudi’s pillars branch like trees
in La Sagrada Familia, Miro’s
moons and stars hang in many–
colored firmaments, and guitar
music rises toward the ceramic
roses on the Palau’s ceiling,
each note luscious, true. 

What is the purpose of art, if not to transform experience?  What is the transformation of experience if not a kind of magic?  Poetry’s magic in this art inspired poem channels Gaudi, Miro and guitar music into a many-colored firmament of human creation.  

In “Artists at Chauvet” Day enters the cave in which our Paleolithic ancestors drew animals in charcoal. The poem’s speaker inhabits the consciousness of one of these artists, looking at his own handiwork—his drawing of a horse. “The artist/ must have surprised himself/by its perfection.” The magic of this poem recreates the experience of seeing those cave drawings, the artist’s reflections on mortality and the sometimes immortality of art, as we the reader travel back over thirty thousand years to stand with our ancestor and reflect that this marvel: an “astonished horse—/galloping through the cave past/stalagmites and stalactities with bison,/aurochs and rhinos—would survive.” The artist is the ancestor of all the painters and sculptors Day visits in her poems, and clearly she claims him as her own.

A darker magic haunts the poem “Falling in Florence.” It begins with a list of all the places in which the speaker, “a clumsy woman,” has fallen, considers the family history of myasthenia gravis, a disease that “causes/ muscle weakening and makes/one fall,” pans in on the exact moment of her fall “on Via Cavour/in Florence after sharing a quatro/stagione pizza with my husband” when she was thinking of the Mocking/of Christ, a fresco painted by Fra/Angelico. We spend the last third of the poem in the painting, which is strangely surrealistic:

A disembodied male head
in a hat, blowing something
on Christ’s face.  Is it water
or spit or words of contempt?
I wondered.  And then I fell. 

No theories or psychological interpretations of the fall, with all the meanings that word has in the Judeo–Christian tradition. Just the plain facts. And the space given the reader to wonder how that terrifying scene at the heart of the Christian mystery, could knock a tourist in Florence off her feet.

 

I Encounter My Soul

Day’s poetic magic takes on the task of self-transformation. That spiritual uplift is elegantly evoked in “Oasis,” an alchemical brew of science, soul, outrage and humor in which she encounters her soul “just before it leaves the party/ at 33,000 feet where/ the dead do as they please.” She questions meaning in a universe where “the President brags about/forcing himself on women.” She finds it in the rapid heartbeat of a hummingbird, and in the miraculous moth of consciousness that finally gets into the “gunman [who} decides/not to shoot after all.”

This theme of joy and praise for the natural world is carried on through poems about children: “Last Day of Zoo Camp,” which lists with delighted details all the fauna the children have encountered, and in her two poems about her young grandson Devin, who announces, in “Beauty and the Boy” that “He wants two children, a boy and a girl/he’ll name Golden Spider and Red Spider.” It continues in “I Am Amazed,” an ecstatic list of amazements from the largest: “the Arches Cluster, the most/crowded place in the Milky Way” to the smallest “a molecule of ATP, which/carries energy to all the cells” to the human: “a boy and a girl…/who spot a speckled woodpecker…//igniting a blaze of amazement.”

In a glorious poem that follows, the speaker becomes “redwoods and rain,//generations of ancestors//”the great-grandchildren/who may or may not be born.” In a profound twist her final poem “Going” questions the first poem in the collection, “It Matters,” in which the speaker lists many detailed things that matter. By the end of the book the poem’s speaker is not so sure about what matters. She confesses: “I always used to think I was going somewhere,” makes a list of all the places she thought she was going, and ends with the soul stirring realization:

Now I see all destinations as stepping stones—
just temporary stops until the last
the journey itself a sack of diamonds
all journeys as one journey…                                

That sack of diamonds—the 74 poems in this collection—created by the pressures, the joys and sorrows of the journey—a long, deeply lived life—is a bag full of treasure.