Elee Kraljii Gardiner, sometimes, forest

 

sick and witching

like a day that begins darkly and rises into pattern
so my scape is written
in small solidarity with the diseased elm
buried and bulbous –
            saying not years but this           just this now       ,

                        , this twenty-four      ,       ,       ,

The latest from Vancouver poet and editor (and current 7^th Poet Laureate of Vancouver) Elee Kraljii Gardiner [see her 2016 ’12 or 20 questions’ here] is sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), following on the heels of her Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016). This new collection is self-described, in part, thusly: “sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker years for in herself. But the coastal temperature rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.” The changes articulate, and her short lyric bursts sit as a kind of constellation around the central core of her subject, or subjects: writing skant, slant, evasive and specifically on and around desire, time, a wealth of trees and the rich life of the forest floor. There is something intriguing about how Gardiner, to date, has composed book-length works, each of which have been shaped around particular subjects; each collection an approach and a response to perception, from the subject of figure skating, writing memories relating directly to her childhood and her mother in her full-length debut to the concussion and recovery poems of her follow-up, and now this ecopoetic around networks, moments, duration and landscape. “try to city / but go boreal,” the poem “cultivated” reads, “at the fence      drip /       rub the pheromone deep / squat and pulse      splatter [.]” Composed during and across the Covid-era, Gardiner’s sketch-poems mark moments across wide distances, offering clusters of lyric that pool and eddy, sit for a bit, and breathe. “come morning,” she writes, to close the poem “in midnight,” “an amnesia step // over strings of viscera // asking guiltlessly, raccoon or coyote?”

Set within a pandemic-era stretch of Vancouver’s coastal temperate rainforest, Gardiner’s ecopoetic responds to more than just the environment, but what the space provides. “sometimes,” she writes, as part of “eluvial,” “forest / I must trust you / more than water / to solve for balance [.]” To open the collection, Gardiner offers this, as her “preamble”:

sometimes, forest was written as an in-situ response to the pandemic and the deadliest weather event recorded in Canada. In June 2021, 619 people died in British Columbia from a week of heat so severe that birds dropped out of the sky mid-flight. In that week of the heat dome, intertidal zones of the Salish Sea reached an excess of 50°C, triggering massive die-offs across species; 70 percent of the populations of bay mussel (Mytilus trossulus) and barnacle (Balanus glandula) perished. Though the head broke, the resultant wildfires, glacial melt, river flooding, landslides, and reduced crop yields have had long-term impacts. As with the pandemic, the toll is complicated and more diffuse than raw data suggests: in Canada, 3.5 million people are living with long COVID, a consequence we are only beginning to recognize. As I witnessed these emergencies, I walked almost every day through the forest thinking about how trans-species and more-than-human networks relate, how they react to crisis, and how they exhibit interdependency and care.

It is interesting, also, how this collection connects to recent work by other British Columbia poets, responding with their own pandemic-era book-length ecopoetic titles around climate, crisis and British Columbia forests, including Kelowna, British Columbia poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Gardiner, in comparison, ramps up an approach to language in its pure form, and the poems of sometimes, forest have such a wonderful thick and rich quality, a mélange of sound and bounce and visual play, offering a layered density of language as thick and teeming with life as any forest floor. “comforted to think you register my footfall in your soil / my weight’s dim thrum-thrum // within soft cacophonies,” she writes, as part of “spit sways,” “piled / in repetition across millennia / four footed, two footed, no footed // in a forest of slither / everything is a desire path [.]” Or, as the poem ends:

how your conifer’s crown feels eternal
            , even if falling      ‘
                        when you sap a pushing emotion inside me