Overland, Natalie Eilbert
Copper Canyon Press, 2023
In
terms of approach, Overland is a book-length essay on the climate crisis,
articulated through direct and indirect statements, shaped through the poetic form
of the first-person lyric narrative. Eilbert’s is a map of metaphoric lines, one
that neither offers position nor direction but allows an articulation of
boundary, offering means of how to directly approach. “I’ve forgotten how to
live.” Eilbert writes, to open the poem “THE LAKE.” Further in the same piece,
offering: “I watch, smoke pours from a window, night a green / mouth. My brothers
have turned libertarian all of a sudden, // all night my mind bleeds through a
screen, what / are your policies, what are your policies, what are.” This is a
map of a landscape that tells you how to read it. It is interesting the ways in
which she slips the names of influences through her poems, whether American
poets Alice Notley or Louise Glück, their influence on her lines woven deep,
only revealing themselves to those who may not have caught through the naming;
caught, if one knows what to look for. “How is it,” she writes, as part of “LAND
OF SWEET WATERS,” I come from Glück’s marshland without any of its blue lore?”
