Defying Extinction
Broadstone Books
$18.50
You can purchase a copy here. (Available June 30, 2022)
Reviewed by Pat Kelly
It is easy to measure time by how it passes; a road pointing only one direction, collecting footsteps. So caught up in moving toward some inevitable destination or existential threat that our surroundings blur into cacophony, that we forget time can be measured in other ways. Within the striations of environment, economy, or art combining all around us, meting out its own path. Within the soft, sometimes whispered truth that life is made up of a series of experiences all flowing together and is best enjoyed that way. Amy Barone’s new poetry collection, Defying Extinction, is the lush flora, the birdsong, the orchestral cricket swoon that beckons us from such roads, compasses abandoned in the dust.
Her poems hum tight, minimalist hymns that feel like nostalgic requiems to the beauty we experience personally throughout a span that feels long only when not measured against the expanse of the world around us. Not a eulogy, but a warm conversation with a friend over coffee, wine, jazz music. Totems are described in rich detail, pulled as threads from fabric, unwoven, placed back within the more natural patchwork of the earth.
The collection moves through five segments. Part 1 provides an expansive documenting of environment and nature, but also economy, urban landscapes, religious echoes. Barone, drawing upon memories of travel, layers past and present, stating facts, but compelling us to create our own insights. Never overt, there is a sense of dread to the poems. In “Island Exiles,” a place rooted in memory and heritage is almost psychically polluted by new knowledge of its own history: “Centuries later, Mussolini rounded up Italy’s gay men, / created internment camps, kept the citizens confined / on the once-glorious Tremiti Islands whose vistas had changed.” The static created from these realizations carry forth into the present, to the point where the section literally ends with Barone wanting to start over on Mars. One feels the yearning to hit the reset button, for Gale Crater to become a new Walden Pond.
Part 2 speaks of animals, individuals. The raw, emotional beauty or strain caused from experiencing what populates our world. Within what is often hidden in plain sight, subtle statements form. A yellow cardinal sighting is a subtle comment on the current state of race in America. John Coltrane’s sax holds space with butterflies and cicadas. The woman who created the sound of rock and roll music is coaxed into the spotlight.
In the next section, Heirlooms, we find ourselves within the heart of the collection. It starts as wide as the previous segments, touching upon art and music, but progressively pulls more and more inward. Proper nouns populate these poems, giving them a secure sense of place, even as her words, tinged brightly with joy and nostalgia, speak of it all in the past tense, crumbling. Marble from Carrara is mined through hard labor to create what we define as important, but is it the rock itself or its manipulation by man that makes it sacred? In “Getting in Tune,” Barone perhaps states her claims most expertly. Practicing what she preaches in a seemingly small set of words and lines, she weaves themes of bittersweet memory with the music of nature; a call to cherish, but transcend through the past. To live in the moment as unaffected by the world as possible:
Tunes tingle memory.
Less can be best.
Break rules.
Tear down the walls of exile.
Expel the darkness
like bees do every spring.
Build the cue. Banish the muse.
Write for a few.
Date music, not musicians.
The section ends by magnifying how personal artifacts are given a timeless reverence, are sacred objects themselves for how they pull the present into the past, through memory, but also onward into the future, through contemplation. A handbell described by its use in the 16th century is brought to present, then past again in “The Bell Museum,” saying that perhaps objects are sacred because they cannot be defined by one specific thing.
In Part 4, she moves seamlessly from totems and artifacts to the memories and dreams that are ensnared within them, further progressing inward. “Talone’s Yard” is beautifully specific, but universal, beckoning you forth even even if you’re unsure you possess the memories of youth and innocence lost:
Years later, I finally learned to inhale.
Half-smoked cigarettes dotted spots under the pines,
where I also left my innocence. Baited by bases.
Kissed by the sun. Sustained by drugstore candy and dreams.
In “Gripped by the Edge of Night,” a crime drama soap opera that managed to stay on the air for almost 30 years becomes a series of cairns navigating us through Barone’s past.
The final section is a quiet requiem. The summation of things, where questions are asked and some conclusions drawn. Here the existential threats of viral infection and climate change re-emerge. Without grand statements, Barone seems to be saying yes, we are responsible for the extinction of so much, this is why we move to dreams of escape and the misleading golden hue of our own memories of a better time, but the world will outlive us and move on. So what are we left with in the face of such humbling epiphanies?
Throughout this collection, what is most clear is that Barrone is a master of the short poem. Ted Kooser is inevitably conjured, but these poems use a far more exotic color palette than the quilt of middle American farmland that Kooser lives within. Defying Extinction is a guide that hints at how to approach the existential threats we face and have contributed to through multiple layers: the death of the past, of friends and family long or recently passed, of the slow consumption of environments and the animals that populate them. Then she asks us to throw out all guides and experience time as a series of moments to be lived through, held on to, cherished.
To seek and to find what we personally define as sacred.
Pat Kelly is a writer from Harrisburg. He creates poetry and fiction that explores the dark fringes of humanity and its impact on time and memory. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry, Buried Litanies. He also occasionally rants in blog form for Raven Rabbit Ram.