The Last Show on Earth, Yvonne Blomer
Caitlin Press, 2022
Yvonne Blomer’s most recent book of poems, The Last Show on Earth, is a love letter to the world in a time of climate crisis. It’s also a love letter to her husband and son, and to her mother and father. So many of the poems in this collection are rooted in the particularity of a person’s life, but then the always present climate crisis hovers as the poet draws a clear parallel between what is cherished, and what is so often lost. Will we, Blomer asks the reader, recognize what something is worth before we risk losing it, or are we just too selfish and ignorant to see its true value before it disappears, before we ruin it?
In “Water and weeds,” Blomer writes: “If we are happy, let it bowl us over./If we are lost, let’s find the shore.” Even when things fall apart, she seems to suggest, we can be hopeful enough to look for the shore. So, this is not a depressing book of climate crisis eco poetry. Instead, it’s a call to wake up and take notice of the awful state of things, but to also choose to make a conscious difference in one’s own life, to begin to change the world from the most immediate place—the place where you can make a difference by choosing to control your own actions. This could perhaps be overwhelming, as a notion, but Blomer balances the warnings with the love that ribbons itself so tangibly and beautifully through her poems.
C.S. Lewis said, in A Grief Observed, that the pain of grief is equal to the pain of the love you have for a person who’s gone from your life. That pain is the same if it’s a person, a species of bird, or a planet, in so many ways. In the poems honouring her mother, Blomer captures the time spent together before her mother died. Anyone who has lost their mother will relate to these poems, ones of gratitude and heartbreak. In the poignant poem, “Now my mom is in a home,” Blomer writes about anticipatory grief—after calling her father at home—“I don’t want to wait for the answer machine,//which is my mother’s voice from years ago,/her fluid liquid voice.” She writes about how voice reveals a person’s spirit: “What is voice but your mother’s song?” By the end of the poem, her mother being bathed by a nurse, the poet writes of her mother’s “soft laugh, my mother-tongue song.” How much is said in this poem, of how we love our mothers, and how we feel the pain of their fading, and then their departure.
“This ocean is a room for the dying, Tahlequah” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by a Robert Bateman painting, as well as by J35, the orca that was named Tahlequah. The orca mother carried her stillborn calf for seventeen days in the waters of the Pacific, off the coast of British Columbia. In writing this poem, Blomer draws parallels between the cycles of life and death, between her own son and mother. As the poet’s mother is dying, her son “breaches and surfs/on the grass outside my mother’s window./Inside we bend over her.” Here is the generational passage of time, when an elderly mother departs while a son is still young and growing.
The poet’s honouring of the orca mother—and her own mother—is about learning to surrender, to trust the process of letting go of someone you love. The hardest lesson is clearly conveyed in Blomer’s poem as she writes: “Tell me about your song. Tell me how long you will hold on.” This is also the place of wanting someone not to suffer, of knowing you must surrender them to what is about to happen, but of also wanting to keep them close. It is a poem about death and how we, as humans, can learn from other creatures, how to love and then let go.
In opposition to death is love, is the potently lively nature of physical desire and sex. In “Petit Chapeau, Cabernet Sauvignon,” the poet reflects on the desire to escape the demands of everyday life. “I’m so fed up. Let’s run away together like we once did/though we didn’t know it at the time.” She writes: “Drink me. Put on that dark grey fedora, I’ll pull my hair long./Let’s finish the bottle and eat the glasses.” Everything here is spontaneous and filled with longing. “Where are you?” the voice of the speaker asks, searching, and then answering: “Setting up the chess board again, while I redden/my queen, ready her.” Then, in “How to stay married,” Blomer considers what keeps a married couple together, how love can shift over time, but can also gather one to the other in a strong way. Three lovely echoing lines ripple through the poem: “Still, he leans into you when he passes,” “Still, you wait for him to join you on the deck,” and “Still, sun-blinded,/you find each other’s eyes.” Love is something that is often reflected in simple happenings, things that are not bright and showy, but are instead deeply rooted and steady.
The constant bell tolling in The Last Show on Earth, though, is rung by the poet’s concern for the natural world, for the damage that’s been done and that continues to be done by humankind. Blomer gives all living things importance by naming them specifically. There are references to dogs, watersheds, snakes, trees, quail, bears, moose, ptarmigan, whales (humpbacks and orcas), elephants, monkeys, lemurs, sea lions, rufous hummingbirds, frogs, pelicans, ravens, ducks, damselflies, bats, caribou, butterflies, tomatoes, rain-soaked children, first loves, crows, and wolves. The various inanimate objects in the book—like wet socks, river rocks, Victoria’s city streets and harbour, plastic, and even hammocks—are also important because they serve as a juxtaposition or contrast to the natural world.
In “Simultaneity,” the two sorts of objects collide as the poet writes: “Plastic has entered the salmon,/the stream/and the sea, the grizzly bear too and the gulls.” In the second last poem in the book, “Our one blue bowl,” Blomer praises “this broken world, the blue within it.” All of it, including “The water, orca, salmon, seaweed, and wrack,/the crow and gull, the chip bag and butt,/the boat debris,” is part of a whole, whether we like it or not. We cannot excise the awful parts but instead need to be more mindful of what damage they do the natural world, and how we can make a difference by changing the ways in which we live our small, temporal lives.
In the final poem, a bittersweet love poem to her son titled “Reading Rilke on my son’s fifteenth birthday,” the poet writes of hope, of love, against the crush of human selfishness that is prominent in the world today. She goes from the larger despair that the world offer us, praising the beauty of her son: “the blue eyes, the dimpled smile, the crooked spine,/the swayed back,/the loud laugh, the voice finding itself” and “the resilience of the boy, the boy, the boy,/and his father, and his mother, all all—” The Last Show on Earth teaches us, clearly and emphatically, to look for the beauty of the natural world, to recognize that it should be fiercely protected for future generations. Too, the poems teach us that the connections we make to one another are also to be valued. If we value each other, we should also value the environment and natural world just as deeply.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com