Local Extinctions
by Mary Quade
Gold Wake Press, 2016
Review by Leah Claire Kaminski
In Mary Quade’s Local Extinctions, nature is fiercely investigated through its relationship to humans and their desires. The speaker perseverates on possession, inhabitation, change—on shrinking the large and beautiful and terrifying to the “local” and intimate, though that doesn’t always make it less terrifying. Want and translate reappear, and in this peculiar and fervent book the words can be agents of death (can mean take) or post-mortem agents of preservation (can mean save). Nature is both at risk and dangerous.
Quade is seriously curious down to the bone—her eyes are wide open and will use any form required, from long to short, from lyric to found to prose. Her tone is barely contained: plainspoken and precise but charged, sometimes grazing menace and sometimes sublimity: bodies are both “carnal and/ carcass” and just before its death by impaling, “the caress of/ the crescent of rabbit” is near holy (14). And so, beauty and desire and death are fretted together into compelling Cornell-boxes of poems.
The book often catalogues flora and fauna, yes, but Quade sees everyday objects and sepia-toned American heartland with the same probing eye. Photography recurs, becoming a not-overbearing metaphor for the speaker’s vision: the poems, as great photography, feel both entirely objective and completely individual to the artist’s mind. Photography also helps figure the book’s preoccupation with consuming and enclosure and protection: in one gorgeous poem about a polar bear, infrared film “can’t capture” it (29), but elsewhere a camera, having taken in our visions, “carries without gestation” (13). This book seems to lyricize Susan Sontag’s distinction between ‘intervention’ and ‘recording’, and the speaker crosses the line willfully into ‘voyeuristic relations’.
As the book’s title indicates, what’s at stake in these voraciously pretty poems is literal death—this is, to steal another photography term from Barthes, the punctum, what draws the speaker’s eye (and the reader’s). In the first section, we tour a gallery of human-sized deaths: daffodils are traffic accidents (“their petaled horns blowing—/ all debris of accident” (8)) and an imagined physician’s handbook details how to clean a bloodstain (“disguise it among like blotches” (19)). The second section begins with a flurry of death as well, this time less fixable by a single human’s gaze: the death of carrier pigeons and other birds, then polar bears. The third section, in poems that are part narrative paean and part cynical commentary, explores the figurative death of a ‘traditional’ American mythos as bygone as those carrier pigeons; a poem in the second section told us that “[a]ll history is loss” (25), and here the loss seeps into baseball games, county fairs, and drive-ins; Americana’s skin is laced too in this final section with the dark veins of human death. The speaker’s gaze thus widens as the poems progress, but the book’s title, of course, has instructed us from the beginning to understand each death in a broader sweep. Reminding us of the larger scale throughout, too, are the section epigraphs. The first two epigraphs give us descriptive prose passages from John Audubon on carrier pigeons: first their awe-inspiring flight, then their massacre, by the millions. The final section’s epigraph quietly announces their 1913 extinction, along with a passage from Revelations. Taken as a whole, then, we are meant to see the early deaths of individual flowers, wasps, moles as part of larger ecological disasters, and their power does increase as we imagine them multiplied.
Despite the clear lines linking individual deaths to broader ecological disasters, though, I enjoyed the book’s early ‘death poems’ even more as private emotional moments, given how darkly beautiful each is. They teem with images of incursion, burrowing, and subsequent “eruptions” —like a daffodil’s poisonous bulb “hid[ing] deep below” (8), a mole is “a dark thing [that] grows under the bright” and a “small kind of cancer” (6). In “Killing Songbirds The Compassionate Way”, the speaker imagines birds she revives with “sugared water /...slip[ped] inside their beaks” trying instead to revive her, inside the house with her “plumage unpreened”, by launching themselves at the structure: a swirl of switching, slippage, broken boundaries. Such visceral occupations and transformations manifest the speaker’s own desire to inhabit something else, to ventriloquize it: so as to see herself better and to avoid seeing inside herself; to escape herself and to know herself. “Let me see myself at arm’s length and not try to get inside”, she says in the funny-but-not piece “Cow Puppet” (10).
The emotional power of the book, for me, comes down to that push-pull of fear and desire, entrance and expulsion. I want to know more about this speaker’s insides even as I’m continually shown the insides of so many other bodies. We know the speaker’s self is crawling with difficulty and contradiction, but not much else; we are blind as moles to her life even as we are alive to a pervasive sense of slippage, a voracious boundlessness. The three-page “Phobia Poems” in the center section satisfied some of my desire to get close to the roots of the speaker’s impulses. There’s a more present ‘you’ in this series (seemingly both child and partner), and we find more direct vulnerability and anxiety from the speaker than elsewhere: “when I lose your face / to the flock of mannequins…/…I feel desperate as mirrors”, she says in the section “Fear of Being Abandoned in a Shopping Mall”. And to a child in “Fear of Choking”, “the world turns / bluer each day. Please take everything in small / bites. I can’t even save myself”. Almost at the center of the book, these poems shed light on what's before and after. The speaker that was once so well-spoken and unflinching, sure of what she sees and says (short lines, short sentences, rhetorical questions only, willing to make pronouncements), productively undermines herself. What she sees and how she sees it, in light of these naked “phobias”, is all about need, and fear, lending a welcome instability.
As her fear of loss in “Phobia Poems” underscores, this writer needs to possess in order to understand; there is sometimes violence in these impulses, and she implicates herself in the extinctions she records. So ultimately, it’s the poems where animals and their individual lives and deaths are fixed in her sometimes-punishing gaze that reveal most about the speaker’s experience of the world, and that I feel most keenly unnerved by. “The Fig” describes a wasp tunneling into a fig, first consuming then being dissolved by a fruit that “eats” it back. The same figs, those “nourishing graves”, are then “chewed” by the speaker; I almost found my own mouth stung: “the fig in my mouth is female, and inside,/ likely,// a wasp” (53-54). On top of the sheer physicality in this poem, the uncanny symbolism strikes me: the invader is invaded, the consumer consumed, the murderer killed and the savior saved, and maybe there wasn’t so much difference between them after all. Quade’s images of invasion and possession, of almost indecent mingling, sting us with sweet horror.
In another gorgeously creepy line, Quade writes of a lawn burrowed into by a now-dead mole that “[a]ll so-called solids are perforated” (6). Throughout the book, she is both the mole, the person who “[i]n every operation, / …is working the inside” (6), and she is the thing being ‘worked’. The wonder is that we become one of these ‘so-called solids’ too: we are not just told but experience, through image, form, and voice, the forcible perforation she’s so concerned with. Alive and dark and skillful, Quade’s intricate tracing of such infinitely complex relations changes my own sight even once I’ve closed the book.