Cold Pastoral
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY)
A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster.
On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral.
In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.”
Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dunham (Glass Armonica) examines three water-related disasters in her fourth book, a collection of documentary-pastoral lyrics addressing the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill, Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, and the lead-poisoning crisis in Flint, Mich. She constructs a narrative of living in a time of spectacular ruin, ecological disaster, and insidious chemical endangerment, with the poet/speaker both proximal to and removed from their effects. To do this Dunham switches between poems of meditation and description ("Feather-vaned, the smoke/ flows up, black-// blooded as the oil plumes/ that will soon unwind// below."), and those incorporating government documents, travel notes, media interviews, product descriptions, and other sources ("Used according to directions, Roundup/ poses no risk to people, animals,// or the environment. Just Pump-n-Go."). She focuses less on ecology or landscape than on the human element of these events rig workers, cleanup and rescue crews, children living in a poisoned world and her experiences viewing them from afar or traveling to do research. Dunham makes it clear that beyond her and others' personal experiences, humans have become subject to a ruin of their own making: "The only thing worse than the disaster itself is what happens when the world decides it's over," she writes. "All fixed. It's a fact any survivor knows."
