Second Acts: An Essay Review of Second Books of Poems
Crucial Passports: Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Five Terraces and Bret Shepard’s Absent Here
Ann Fisher-Wirth, Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005)
Bret Shepard, Absent Here (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024)
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
To some extent, all poems concern place, if only because, as language acts, they take place, they occur in time and space—in the process of their making, in their re-conjuring in the theater of thought that is the reader’s imagination.
Seamus Heaney has said that one main function of poetry is to write place into existence. But there are some poets for whom place is not just subtext, but subject—place as in physical environment or surroundings, as in a particular region or location. The two second books I’ve chosen to pair for this essay, written twenty years apart, are authored by poets known for their interest in physical place or region, and in particular for the ways in which the ecologies of human experience/sentience and the non-human physical environment interact.
Ann Fisher-Wirth has taught for over 35 years at the University of Mississippi, where she directs the Environmental Studies minor. A senior fellow and board member of The Black Earth Institute, she was, in 2006, President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). With Laura Gray-Street, she is the co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013). Her work is always steeped in the context of places she’s inhabited—California, Paris, Sweden—and perhaps especially the biome of Mississippi (“Kudzu’s ragged emerald / splays across the gully // stormclouds hover / a bumblebee stumbles through grasses / sucks the thick yolk of magnolias // tiretracks ripple / in mud beneath your feet / shadowy cedars loom at dream’s torn selvage,” from “Mississippi”). Bret Shepard, a native of Alaska’s North Slope, is the author of Place Where Presence Was, which won the Moon City Press Book Award, as well as two chapbooks: Territorial, winner of the Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review, and Negative Compass, winner of the 2018 Wells College Chapbook Prize. Shepard’s poems are particularly and inextricably connected to the ways in Arctic phenomena are a bellwether microcosm of huge forces affecting earth, what the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer calls “our island home”: forces that “house” us and that we house within.
When Fisher-Wirth published Five Terraces in 2005, we were, if some scientists are to be believed, in late phase two of the Anthropocene, in a period known as the Great Acceleration (1945–2015), a term used to describe a period of rapidly increasing effects of human activity on the earth’s natural systems. And while in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy rejected, for various reasons, the “Anthropocene” as a defined geological period, there is clear evidence that human activities have contributed in the past couple of decades to dramatic climate and other planetary changes that cannot be ignored—by anyone, and certainly not by anyone writing about place.
By coincidence, on the day I began drafting this essay, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day newsletter brought me a poem by Marcella Agnes Fitzgerald (born 1845) called “A Winter Day,” which begins:
Great waves of sunlight all our land are flooding—
Our glorious land, so verdant and so fair,
Where peaceful labor o’er the scene is brooding,
And bird-songs burden all the balmy air,
From north to south, yea, to the bounds of vision,
We gaze on naught but beauty’s perfect lines—
Vales that recall the fabled fields Elysian,
And dells that echo to the singing pines.
For any poet with even an iota of awareness about the current environmental crisis, it would be nigh impossible to write this kind of pastoral with any credibility. Yet poetry from every era has much to teach us about what we’ve had, what we’ve lost or might yet lose. Such is the case with the second poetry collections of Ann Fisher-Wirth and Bret Shepard, whose subjects and respective sensibilities very much reflect place not only in their aesthetics, but in the temperature, so to speak, the “weather” of their given moments.
In a 2019 interview with Lynn Keller for the podcast edgeeffects, poet Brian Teare talks about how walking is one way to develop one’s bioregional literacy:
Walking is a form of physical intimacy with a place and a way of getting to know a place on a human scale. Ultimately, for me walking is a deeply pleasurable measure of a place, and it generates language through encounters with sensations, smells, tastes, and textures. I think watching anthropogenic change at a local level the way one can in Philadelphia [where Teare lived at the time] is a way of measuring with one’s body and mind the things that are happening in analogous ways on a biospheric level, and the way that we’re entangled and inextricable from the more “natural” processes around us like hydrology. One can witness those things on foot in a way that isn’t abstract, as a way of teaching oneself what it means to be in a place.
Five Terraces is book-ended with two long “walking” sequences titled “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll” (“Le Grand Fleuve à perte de vue”). In her end-note regarding this poem, Fisher writes:
Wu Wei, 1450–1509, lived during the Ming Dynasty. This room-length horizontal scroll was on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, in the exhibit of Montagnes célestes during the spring and early summer of 2004. Translated from the French translation from the Chinese, the title means, approximately, “the great river as far as the eye can see,” or, more evocatively, “the great river to the loss of sight or view.”
In her sequence, the poet “narrates” the scroll as she experiences walking along beside it in the museum, noting what she sees, imagines, or wonders about as she passes through its depictions of scenes along the river. The second version of the poem at the book’s close simply narrates the same sections, but in reverse. As the poet says at one point, “half the people walking this scroll / here at the Grand Palais on the 21st of June / move left to right, and half move right to left / It doesn’t matter.”
This delicate, precise poem (which, incidentally, was printed as a broadside by the Center for Book Arts in Charlottesville, Virginia, as part of a chapbook contest) foregrounds Fisher-Wirth’s process for conjuring place, for “going,” as Theodore Roethke writes in his villanelle “The Waking,” “where I have to go.” There is a Zen quality of moving forward as the Way opens to all of these poems (“No climax,” she writes, “no conclusion.”). At times, the poet points out painterly and material details of the scroll, brushstrokes or stains, but most compelling is her sense of blurred fluidity between the world rendered on the scroll and the inner self:
Where would I be in this? I would be anywhere.
Each thing singular, each thing perfect,
fog and water
and tree and rocks, the fish that swims in its bowl,
the blood that swims in the bowl of the body.
Entrails, cilia—and here, toward the left side of the scroll,
the faintest touches of pink:
Why? As if dawn is coming?
For me, it is that faint touch of pink that signals Fisher-Wirth’s awareness of the ambiguity of what is always coming, something beyond the river’s end, beyond what we can know or control—“Le Grand Fleuve à perte de vue,” what is beyond sight or view. This is something that we see in the book’s other poems, whether their topics concern aging, relationships (motherhood, marriage, a long-lost lover), erotic love, mortality. In the first poem’s last section (which becomes the first section of the second version of the poem), she writes,
But the faintest pink in the houses to the left—
is that dawn,
or has someone lit some tiny lanterns?
Is the tinge of pink, like pale blood, like a weird lambent fire, something natural? Something human-made? Is it an image of hope (day dawns anew)? Or is there just a hint of something boding or portentous? However one experiences this repeated image of pink light, its origin is offered as a question, not an answer.
The book contains other inklings that, to quote Roethke’s poem again, “Great Nature has another thing to do / To you and me,” often as a result of human intervention. The title poem, for example, describes how the speaker’s father, a distant figure, “terraced the back yard in Berkeley, sweat-drenched, hacking out blackberry vines all that summer.” As he toils, dividing “an eroding weed-choked hillside into five terraces,” he also pushes himself toward his own death. Thinking about the terracing in retrospect, postmortem, the speaker writes,
I know him down there somewhere: after the war, after Japan, after his retirement from the Army, those brief Berkeley years when my parents thought at last they’d have a life together. He chops out weeds, cuts back briars, digs terrace levels and smooths the clay. His muscles rope across his back, sweat stings his eyes, as he hauls the heavy railroad toes, terracing. He makes the earth stand still.
Any attempt to make the natural world “stand still” is something Fisher-Wirth understands to be, finally, impossible. Whether walking the Mississippi streets in the wake of a mother’s death, moving restlessly through the streets of Paris to see what, if anything, it means to be contacted by an old lover though both speaker and old lover are happily married, or cavorting as a character named Trinket in a meta sequence about a college drama production (a role that allows the speaker to confront her abiding erotic desires in an aging body), Fisher-Wirth acknowledges that “I can’t outwalk myself.” In whatever place she inhabits, whatever streets or boards or scrolls she traverses, she is there. And she is there, in the natural world to which she attends and loves, already with a prescient sense of the myriad ways that world is going to be challenged in the years to come. In “Sphinx, Star-Gazer, Mountain,” a poem for a grieving friend (the poet Beth Ann Fennelly), Fisher-Wirth (also a yoga teacher), reminds her friend to “Follow the breath. / Just follow the breath. / Let the thoughts grow calm.” She imagines a moment when the session is over, and the friend sees her daughter Claire:
Your face after yoga when you see Claire
is all the birds at dawn
in the trees outside my window. Trouble is coming,
trouble is all around, and I wish for you
the heart a flower,
at its center a golden fountain.
*
Bret Shepard’s second full-length book of poems, Absent Here, winner of the AWP 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, enters the world twenty years further into the (d)evolution of the planet than the advent of Fisher-Wirth’s sophomore collection in 2005. That it takes as its primary subject the terrain of Alaska’s North Slope, a region of utmost ecological importance and which might well be considered a ground zero harbinger of what’s yet to come, only further italicizes the intensity of these poems and their relationship to the environment. According to a recent piece in the New York Times about this part of Alaska, “Worldwide, roughly twice the amount of the heat-trapping carbon now in the atmosphere has been locked away in the planet’s higher latitudes in frozen ground known as permafrost. Now that ground is thawing and releasing its greenhouse gases.”
If Fisher-Wirth explores and enacts place via a kind of peripatetic, Charles Wright-like “looking around,” Shepard’s poems move into and through place through physical sensations that can be haptic but also experienced as a kind of oneiric swelling and ebbing—acute presences/sensations in flux with almost white-out absences. In this way, these poems of tundra, kettle pools, and caribou reverberate with economies of motion not unlike the geology of the North Slope itself. According to Wikipedia, “Within the North Slope, only a surface ‘active layer’ of the tundra thaws each season; most of the soil is permanently frozen year-round. On top of this permafrost, water flows out to sea via shallow, braided streams or settles into pools and ponds.” In this way, the warming Arctic, as Brian Teare says in his back cover endorsement of the book, undoubtedly “fuels / what the rest of us feel.” Here is the opening section of “On Ice”:
I’ve read ice referred to as earth’s air conditioner. We sleep
as it forms, expands, melts—a simple process, as simple
as holding each other through night. The steps are exactly
the same for letting go of each other in the morning.
Swelling comes from being a world to yourself for too long.
The suggestion that what is happening in and to the earth has correspondences in the tug and pull, the attraction and withdrawal in somatic experiences and human relationships is one of the book’s most arresting features. In “Lines toward Browerville, AK,” the speaker writes, “Living in absence is as inevitable / as beach at high tide. // To signify what is taken, to say what is / missing the turn home—/ the emptiest of nights turns ceiling / above the floor plan for absence.” “I receive experience quietly, like tundra / disappears stories,” Shepard writes in “Tundra Forms.” “Below lupine / and willow // permafrost // is conjunction. . . . It is called field dressing because // I am taken apart / like an animal on the tundra.” It is in attending to these pulses—freeze and melt, the here and elsewhere of both body and place—that Shepard sensorially “maps” memory and loss.
The book contains six poems titled “Here but Elsewhere” (seven if you count one given in two versions). These poems, of course, evoke and speak to the book’s title. Not only does this series, interspersed throughout the book, give us variations on the collection’s leitmotifs—the inhuman landscape and human attempts to name and map it, the failure of art to paint or fill “the time” in the way the natural world does, the sense of an “open room beyond this room, far past / ourselves,” the ubiquity of distances, the elusiveness of answers, the particular palpability and pain of absence/separation—but it also challenges what it means to write a place—or to write at all, since any “here” a poet attempts to conjure is always written (and read) at a remove, an elsewhere. Here is the book’s last “Here but Elsewhere” poem, the penultimate in the collection:
Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq
name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds
from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them
now if my mouth could shape the words.
___________
Snow takes the most of us when it comes
to fall. In what felt like Spokane’s worst
snowstorm for decades, my brother and I
only had mukluks for our feet, the fur warm
and foreign, absent of what had sold out
in stores across the white city. All we had
was distance. All we wanted, the snow
boots with the Velcro every other kid wore.
_____________
We carry too much of the past. Expansive
bodies like snow melt. It’s not the only thing
leaving, leaving, leaving. It melts into smaller
bodies of water, so we must wade through it
to the source, because the arctic doesn’t freeze
itself. It grows into what it must be, and is.
The cultural and linguistic distances in this poem—the lost sounds of the the Inupiaq name, the little boys resorting to mukluks despite what “every other kid wore”—are inseparable for this speaker from what is happening to the natural world that is “leaving, leaving, leaving.” The poems are ruthless but not without yearning, as the last two sections of “On Ice” attest:
5.
What I want is for my sons to survive long enough to see
what we each become, and to hold it until I break apart.
I want to write on ice. Enough to fall through it. Enough
to break the present moment backward. To numb
enough of the body to the point where I don’t feel myself
holding me, that these arms might be someone else’s arms
pulling me back up. Listen, most days we need to empty
the house of our ten thousand things. This harming warm
we splay for, these places we create, it all needs an ice bath
after the damage done here, needs a cry in cryotherapy.
6.
All the tears, translations we freeze for the future hurting.
That “cry in cryotherapy”—vintage Shepard in its understated wit and grief—is such a moving and indicting phrase, evoking not only the medical procedure by which extreme cold is used to remove abnormal tissue, but also “cryopreservation,” the process by which sperm (or in this case, tears) are frozen for future use (or, again, in this case, “future hurting”) against the “damage done here.”
*
Eavan Boland, in her foreword to The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2017, ed. Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider), writes that “place” might, after all, be a fiction. But these two poets, in their distinct ways, suggest otherwise. A fiction is human-made; these poets attend, albeit through language, to what is beyond the human. That Shepard’s evocations seem more dire than Fisher-Wirth’s may be due as much to aesthetic differences as to the twenty years of planetary damage that separate these two books. That said, it is revelatory to read the collections in tandem. And while I’ve spoken of “maps” in relation to each poet’s praxis, I don’t mean mapping of place in any traditional sense, but rather in the sense offered by the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside, who passed away in May 2024: “The lyric offers the same radical illumination that chance affords us when we wander off the map. For poetry works where maps are useless: like a passport, the lyric allows us to enter the otherworld, but is neither road map nor field guide.” Five Terraces and Absent Here offer us essential passports to imperiled worlds, both here and elsewhere.