Nancy Holmes, Arborophobia

 

 

WTF—THE ANTHROPOCENE?

Back when the nights
were nightier
and summers yellower,
you couldn’t drive
a country mile
without getting
goop all over
your windshield.
The revolting splats—
who misses them?
But it’s weird, isn’t it,
all this invisible stuff
just
disappearing.

I was curious to see the latest by Okanagan, British Columbia poet Nancy Holmes, her Arborophobia (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2022), given my recollections of my earlier days exploring contemporary poetry, and how much I enjoyed her second collection, not long after it originally appeared. This is her sixth full-length poetry collection to date, so I’m uncertain as to why her prior titles aren’t listed here: Valancy and The New World (Kalamalka Press, 1988), Down to the Golden Chersonese: Victoria Lady Travellers (Sono Nis Press, 1991), The Adultery Poems (Ronsdale Press, 2002), Mandorla (Ronsdale Press, 2005) and The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale Press, 2012). Arborophobia is made up of a series of narrative, meditative lyric on trees and dementia, loss and falling, mothers and motherhood, grief and erosion. Holmes writes of breakings, and of breaking apart, from climate to forests to the human ability to endure. “They say everyone eventually / gets dementia.” she writes, to open the poem “MEAT.” “We / flip through crosswords / and eat too much beef.” She speaks of time, and the measure, misuse, misunderstanding and even limitations of such a human scale. “Of course you want more.” she writes, as part of the twelve-part sequence “THE TIME BEING,” “But truly, you can’t / fit any more into your life.”

In five sections—“ORB,” “ARBOROPHOBIA,” “STAIN,” “JULIAN” and “PATH”—Holmes writes lyrics that wrap themselves around a conversation around the Anthropocene, attempting to, as the back cover offers, “grapple with the problem of hope in times of crisis.” Through long, narrative stretches, she offers poems as companion pieces to climate anxiety, personal loss and the uncertainty of where we sit as a species, thanks in large part due to an array of choices both historic and ongoing. As she offers as part of her notes at the end of the collection:

“Arborophobia,” sometimes spelled “Arboraphobia,” means fear and hatred of trees. It was likely coined by architect Robin Boyd in his 1960 book The Australian Ugliness. The term describes the tendency of architects, developers, landscapers, agriculturalists, and Western society in general to transform ecosystems by destroying trees and native plants, ostensibly in the name of aesthetics and culture.