Brandon Kilbourne, Natural History: poems

 

On the trail of oblivion’s beasts,
their lives now nothing more
than tales sealed down in deposits
of bones sown epochs ago,
we have traveled across the globe
in search of their fabled remains
as this glacier-scraped latitude,
the lengths ventured to retrieve
their stories like something out of
the myth of seafarers after the gold
of a ram’s flayed fleece, its wool
lying at the world’s known edge
lustrous as a hearth’s flame— 

Leaving camp each morning,
trudging over dips and tussocks
of moss and following the treeless
valley, we come to the outcrop,
set about the sweat-beading business
of shoveling away overburden,
combing the hillside’s scree
for the telltale hue and texture
betraying weathered-out bone,
scrappy inklings leading us
to where in the quarry we’ll settle
on our knees, our focus trained
on the revelations of broken strata. (“Gilled Beginnings”)

The full-length debut by American poet and research biologist Brandon Kilbourne, and winner of the Cave Canem Prize, is Natural History: poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2025), a collection described as one that “illuminates the intersections between science and poetry and brings the role of the evolutionary biologist to life.” Poets have certainly been attending and mining scientific information and research for moons, but there is something of Kilbourne’s approach reminiscent of such as American poet Lorine Niedecker (see also: “Lake Superior”) or Ottawa poet Monty Reid (specifically The Alternate Guide, although he’s long written about and through his work in natural history museums—Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum and Ottawa’s Museum of Nature—across multiple collections): the poems as a result of the research that emerged from their day-job, allowing the poems as a kind of secondary and extended response to that initial data. “Carcasses / hand-arranged from field notes resurrect / the world without handprint smokestacks,” Kilbourne writes, in the third poem in the six-part sequence “Dioramic Idylls,” “pretend we haven’t devoured the Earth, / leaving our eyes to probe their glass / eyes. Their thick skins’ presence / dissolves the distance, / anchors in the firsthand fauna / of photographs and nature films— [.]” There is something of the sense of not only what Kilbourne has learned through his years of studies, but what else he’s learned, what elements and truths not directly related but essential to that particular craft. He speaks of the natural world and its possibility, but also its inherent fragility, threatened through progressive and entirely destructive human activity.

Set in four sections of poems—“THE CURIOUS INSTITUTION,” “MEMORY MUSEUM,” “DISPATCHES FROM ELLESMERE” and ‘BLINDFOLD WONDER,” along with a Forword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey—there’s such a thickness, a heft, to his lyric, offering poems that push entirely through his subject with incredible detail, moving through information as only a poet might, seeing connections and movements across a wealth of possibility. He writes scientific detail from a foundation of knowledge, but just as much beauty, wonder and a sense of magic, as the poem “The Oceanographer,” a poem subtitled “Inspired by the Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus,” begins: “I know the swirls and eddies of these seas / like the lines navigating my own palms. / I have traveled the seas to all the world’s / corners—spice harbors beyond the map’s / borders, merchant ports brimming with ducats, / the rock face caves of runners and smugglers. / My time on these waves has wizened my brow, / while the salt winds have gnawed my hair brittle / and lashed knuckles clenched round my raised spyglass.” There is such joy, such appreciation, through these poems, composed as explorations through enormous possibility. Or, as Trethewey writes as part of her introduction:

Among the perspectives of explorers and scientists, visitors and guides of Natural History is that of the poet himself. As a research biologist working more than twenty years in natural history museums, Dr. Kilbourne has examined the artifacts and plumbed their meanings. The result is a complex meditation on wonder and devastation of the natural world and an elegy for the earth by an observer who sees, clear-eyed, the ways it “premonishes disappearance.” Aptly, the wonder of the poet is likened to a marvelous universe wherein early trips to the American Museum of Natural History kindled the desire for scientific knowledge long before the understanding of its dark underbelly.

The opening poem of the third section, “The Location We Look For,” subtitled “Arriving on Ellesmere Island,” that includes: “The location we look for lies underground, / now a memory repressed down in rock / recalling this island before it was even / an island, where a fish and its near kin / tinkered with fins to bear a body’s weight / and free themselves from water, back when / this land beneath our feet sat at the equator / and was teeming with tropical swamps, / horsetail forests towering above the water, / before its landmass traveled the oceans, / tectonic clockwork conveying its shores / to the Arctic amid drifting continents.” Or the ending of the poem “Dead Reverence,” that reads:

Tending to this skeleton on this far northern
outcrop, jacketing its fragile form with layers
of moistened toilet paper following by layers
of wet plaster, we unearth this fossil with a reverence
that I’d wager was alien to this fish when alive:
long without any flesh to devour or motions
to still, its ramshackle remains at last unlock,
like diorama fauna revived by our imagination,
the due awe never found while it was breathing.