Kim Trainor, A blueprint for survival: poems

 

327.45 ppm

I begin with 1972, year 11,972 of the Holocene era, the year The Ecologist published A Blueprint for Survival to warn that we were running out of time. My mom in a yellow tank top and bell-bottom jeans grips my sister by her left hand, me by the other. We’re dressed in identical play suits, apple-green sleeveless tops and sky-blue shorts. I’m barefoot, with a turquoise floral kerchief. I can feel the heat baked into the granular sidewalk, grit under my toes. From the front door of our house on east 56^th, an entrance we never use except for guests, there’s a clear view of Mount Baker. We always take the side entrance—through the mudroom where my mom stands for hours by the hinged window, pinning laundry with wooden pegs to the line, reeling it out to flap in the breeze, reeling it back again, sterilized by the sun. The snap of white sheets folded into squares. A fresh scoured smell of earth and wind. This is my earliest memory.

Writing from and through Delta, British Columbia and wildfire season while “charting a long-distance relationship,” Kim Trainor’s fourth full-length collection is A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book-length poem around climate crisis, fires and long-distance love, following her collections Karyotype (London ON: Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Toronto ON: Book*hug 2018), and A thin fire runs through me (Fredericton NB: Icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Furthering her examination of the book-length lyric suite, A blueprint for survival seems comparable Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] for their shared book-length British Columbia perspectives around climate crisis and wildfires, but with added layers of emotional urgency. As Trainor’s poem “Iridium,” set in the first section, includes: “I can’t read anymore. / There is no clear way. I will venture out along white tracks. Mark ink / on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay down strips of black carbon. Scatter / signals of plutonium and nitrogen, Tupperware, chicken bones, lead. / Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn. Make fire. Write poems. / Conserve. Despair. Decay.”

There is a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names. A few pages further into the first section, as the poem “Paper Birch” begins: “These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, but poetry / seemed very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / of the Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffee dregs, and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except by Skype (I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in flesh meandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research on the Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection, articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin.