Kim Trainor : A small quiet voice in the dark: ecocide and lyric poetry

 

 

 

 

I am mindful that as I write this essay, the boreal is on fire across the prairies; thousands of people have been evacuated; there are fires too in British Columbia, Alberta, northwest Ontario. Last year was our worst wildfire season in recorded history; according to the New York Times, 7,100 wildfires burnt 37 million acres, “an area larger than the size of England.”[1] And this occurs amidst the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction and the on-going breaching of Earth’s planetary boundaries – topics I attempt to write about in my own poetry:

Camped out all day in the foyer of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science as snow falls.
A blank softness. Diffuse light. Drifts of people meet for coffee, then disperse.
I’m reading papers on the shore ice melting at Port Hope, on the tar sands and the toxicity
of the Athabascan river—a landscape resembling a war zone marked
with 200-foot-deep pits and thousands of acres of destroyed boreal forests.
This sticky viscous bitumen. This most destructive project.
The sea ice declines. Inuit elders say, Something has happened—the Earth has tilted
on its axis. The sun sets in a different place. The stars are not where they once were. 

(“Iridium,” A blueprint for survival, Guernica Editions, 2024)

In the face of such existential threat, lyric poetry seems helpless, pointless even, no more than a small quiet voice in the dark. 

Yet increasingly, in the podcasts I listen to, amongst the scientists I read, the ecological activists and theorists I follow, I see often a turn towards poetry, sometimes as symbol, sometimes not, as they call for a frame shift, a different way of seeing, listening, being with and among other humans and more-than-human kin in a complex interdependent web of lives: poetry not as a substitute for various actions and interventions, but as an opening, to hold space for others, for the small quiet voice to be heard. And it is often adjacent to or resonant with Indigenous conceptions such as etuaptmumk (‘2-eyed seeing’)[2] and tsawalk (‘one,’ ‘everything is one’),[3] to longstanding Indigenous epistemologies and practices that are grounded in an intimate knowledge of place.

On New Year’s Day I participated in a S'iwes te Temexw Ceremony at the Blue Heron Nature Reserve in Chilliwack. There was a planting of four young cedar trees, with offerings of salmon to nourish their new life, and then a walk to the Vedder River, where offerings of cedar boughs were made to the waters and the wild salmon. This was followed by a tobacco ties ceremony, as described by the invitation,

“offering our heartfelt, reverent prayers to Mother Earth, and sending our loving kindness, compassion and peace to ripple out into the world.  We will renew our collective commitment to walk softly on Mother Earth and do our part to restore the habitat of fish and wildlife.  Together, we can help transform the world for the greater good, for the wellbeing of current and future generations in honour of our eternal ancestors.”

This peaceful, mindful ceremony has stayed with me all year, meandering, grounding, and I somehow find that I am preoccupied, without any deliberate or conscious intention, with river in my reading. My hope then for this little essay is for it to be an opening of sorts, to hold space for these books and their quiet voices.

I’m returning to the classroom in the fall after two years of service in the faculty union, and re-reading in preparation for this a slim volume I’ve taught before, Rita Wong’s undercurrent. The poem “Unsung Service” is dedicated to Stó:lō, the Fraser River, and begins on the Samson V, a 19^th-century paddle-wheeler turned maritime museum moored on the shores of the Fraser near the College where I work; I walk past it daily, the water chalk-green and brown, stitched with log booms and tugboats, while new luxury condos rise precipitously on its banks. The poem observes how the boat/museum “faces the port where mazdas & audis enter / as raw logs exit, the engine of capitalist ideology attacks the river.” It asks, “what will future earthlings find in the neoliberal middens left behind?” And concludes in the voices of kin, “We are tardigrades and tawny owls, river dolphins and rockhopper penguins, slow sloths and fast elk […] We are your relatives […] We call upon you to remember your ancient oaths, your debts to all realms that enable your existence, your obligations as earth-dwellers.”[4] I will bring my students here, to Stó:lō, and we will write some poems with river.

And we will also read poems by two poets I’ve been in long-distant communication with these past few months, talking about ecopoetry, lichen, rivers, an entangling of ideas and intentions. sophie’s book is a long communion with a river, Conversations with the Kagawong, in which she creates space for river to speak. As she notes in her poem “February 15: The Wind and a Spruce Tree Along the Kagawong River Collaborating on a Text,” “I have been wondering what the Gaagigewang Ziibi might say about herself if she wrote her own plaques and texts.” So she tied a sharpie to a long string attached to a spruce branch to see what Gaagigewang Ziibi might say. I cannot quote the poem that follows, as it is a series of lines scribbled by the wind on a piece of paper placed along the banks of the river. As sophie notes in “September 8,” “I increasingly feel the River watching me. Sometimes I feel she knows when I’m here. Sometimes I feel we listen together. I greet her each time I come.”[5] I felt this sentience and watching presence, although I was a newcomer, on New Year’s Day along the shore of the Vedder as we dropped branches of cedar into the clear waters and said our prayers. As Renée, who first brought the three of us together in conversation, writes, in her poem “Water is,” water is “elemental” and “calls us back to ourselves;” “water at play is water / is the bear splashing salmon / and she the bearer of water.”[6] 

This knowing, that river is elemental, living within us and a living being, a person, is the focus of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? As he describes in the introduction, when he told his 10-year old son the title of his book, his son said, “’Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad … because the answer is yes!’”[7] What any child knows, many of us have long since forgotten. Macfarlane begins by exploring the oddity that water is seen as a commodity, as “liquid asset,” that “it is normalized that a corporation, in the eyes of the law, is an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue—but that a river who has flowed for thousands of years has no rights at all.” His use of the pronoun ‘who’ is one small attempt to nudge us towards Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘grammar of animacy,’[8] an animacy that Rita and Renée and sophie all speak to in the poems I have just described, an animacy lost to the hypercapitalist industrial world that processes all forests, rivers, waters, beings, as resources or standing reserve. Macfarlane discusses the legal movement known as “Rights of Nature,” which first saw some success in Ecuador’s new constitution, ratified on 28 September 2008, that enshrined the rights of Pachamama, water as “‘inalienable, imprescriptible, unseizable and essential for life.’”[9] He describes this Rights of Nature movement as “an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows.” I think of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s report on pathways for legal personhood for the Fraser River Estuary, under threat now as former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault (then Minister for the Environment) and the liberal government under Trudeau gave the green light to the construction of Roberts Bank Terminal 2, a massive extension to the terminal currently there. The Raincoast Conservation Foundation observes that “the estuary, and all the living things it supports, are not viewed as having intrinsic worth. Economic imperatives consistently override the need for ecological protection, and as a result, threaten the very existence of one of the most ecologically important regions in the province.”[10] RB2 threatens a complex web of life, from salmon to resident orcas to biofilm that feeds the western sandpipers and dunlins enroute to breeding grounds in Alaska and the arctic.

Of course, these movements for legal personhood for rivers attempt to bend western legal frames to encompass what cannot be encompassed— Stó:lō is the water that flows bearing silt through shifting banks and channels, the salmon that return each year to spawn and die, the mudflats at the estuary, the diatoms and the biofilm slurped up by the rough tongues of western sandpiper and dunlins who then fly in their shifting murmurations along the Pacific Flyway—migratory routes that span the continents,[11] water that is drawn up into cycles and returns again and again as rain, as fog, as river.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speaks to this in her theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. I attended the Vancouver launch of her book at the St. James Community Square in April, a launch that was held as a conversation between herself and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Nibi—water—she writes, “is interdependent and decentralized, a vessel for multitudes of land- and water-based species and communities.”[12] And nibi “decentres itself: it leaks, moves, flows and reconnects, not as real estate or enclosure or property, but as a living network, linking endless forms of life working with each other to bring about more life, more diversity of life, more abundance of life.” She moves beyond the idea of a western legal framework and asks, “What if, instead, we obliterated the categories of gender and human and rights altogether, and created lateral, co-operative systems of sharing, all in service to bringing forth more life?”

These are some of the small quiet voices I listen for.

 

---

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/canada-wildfires-2025.html

[2] “Etuaptmumk / Two-eyed Seeing and Beyond.” https://rwok.ca/dialogue-4

[3] E. Richard Atleo, Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (UBC Press, 2007). https://www.ubcpress.ca/tsawalk

[4] Rita Wong, undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). https://nightwoodeditions.com/products/9780889713086?srsltid=AfmBOooKc-sZV1NnVYYRLdi4terDfqEyE64Rxk2OYLc2u7GxEAXeETfd

[5] sophie anne edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talon Books, 2024). https://talonbooks.com/books/conversations-with-the-kagawong-river

[6] Renée M. Sgroi, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions, 2024). https://guernicaeditions.com/products/in-a-tension-of-leaves-and-binding?srsltid=AfmBOopm2j7Z-cBmfLeI6hBqbQbe6pqQtxfSqR4M5w4MUP5VIUQT46QS

[7] Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/724830/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane/9781039007956

[8] https://orionmagazine.org/article/robin-wall-kimmerer-language-animacy/

[9] https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Ecuador_2021

[10] Pasternak and Walters, “Rights of Nature.” https://www.raincoast.org/reports/fraser-personhood/

[11] https://bcbirdtrail.ca/field-notes/birding-202-pacific-flyway/

[12] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/742373/theory-of-water-by-leanne-betasamosake-simpson/9781039010246

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A blueprint for survival appeared with Guernica Editions in 2024. Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) as well as in Athens, Dublin, New Zealand, Copenhagen, Seattle, and elsewhere. Kim’s most recent project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC at the mouth of the Sto:lo (Fraser) River, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. She will also be a featured reader at "Poetry by the River: Environmental Stewardship through the Arts," taking place this month in London, Ontario, which will begin with a river cleanup at the Forks of Deshkan Ziibi/the Thames. Her next book, Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form appears with Oskana Poetry and Poetics (University of Regina Press) in February 2026.  She lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.

 

 

Kim Fahner : In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Renée M. Sgroi

In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Renée M. Sgroi
Guernica, 2024

 

 

 

Renée M. Sgroi’s second book of poetry, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, plants itself (pun intended) in the space of a small vegetable garden. In the collection’s first poem, “systema,” Sgroi plays with form and draws a connection between language and plants. We read printed words on a page from left to right in English, and recognize the form of sentences and paragraphs—or lines and stanzas—so the poet compares the way in which “a book//sifts pages, weeds out loosestrife   ,  phragmites/ploughs fields like oxen.” The poet ploughs the fields, chooses where to plant the images and how to structure the piece. Then, in the first version of Sgroi’s “morphology” poems,  the piece takes on the shape of a box on the page, summoning up the concrete, visual image of a field in the reader’s mind, and the word choices that map out the space conjure the essences of colour, texture, scent, and taste. The reader, then, is left to consider what might fill in the empty white space of the middle, perhaps suggesting the space of the garden plot as a metaphor for life, even.

One particularly fascinating aspect of these poems is the way in which the various parts of the natural world and environment take on sentience through voice. In “earth,” the land chastises humans as the poet writes: “how you bulldozed me, ripped//me of flesh/inside   in   out, tied…bruises beneath bark, lies seeding the saltiness of oceans//my protuberances you chopped/math-like.” The voice goes on to intensify the litany of sins, speaking of how humans have been “reaping my fecundity//settling city after/city,” with “subway turnstiles/like animals, toxic/mix of methane and atmosphere.” In “Sciuris carolinensis,” which is the Latin phrase for ‘squirrel,’ the squirrel’s voice pleads “bury me under heavy snow and not by the road: I too/have seen my likeness flattened there, decaying, or bury/me beneath a tree, tall limb to my shortened appendages” and then finally ends by saying, “but do not bury me within the old growth forest thinking/you have blessed me with my habitat, for you will one day/raze that space to pour concrete and my body, like yours,/is meant for scavenging worms.” These poems give the various aspects and creatures of the natural world agency, all while reminding readers that they have a responsibility to think before acting senselessly when it comes to the fate and future of the environment in their own respective towns and cities.

The poems in In a Tension of Leaves and Binding are also about the passing of time, seasons, and of loss. In a poem like “apple trees in late winter as if angry,” Sgroi writes of blossoms that “eventually fall,” and branches that look “like wizened Medusas” when they bear snow. In the poem, “in metamorphosis,” too, the first line continues from the title to read “the Buddha says everything changes.” Yes, everything in the natural world is cyclical, and this theme is constant throughout the book. In “preparing to overwinter,” the speaker begins with: “after you died, they sent a bouquet//pink and white flowers with a bow/lilies, large stargazers” and ends with images of the same bouquet, before winter snow, being composted, “tossed on dead remains of garden/yellowed tomato stalks, blackened leaves of basil.” As the wilted petals return to the cold earth, the mourners “mulched/the petals in wet soil/returning a part of you/to earth.” The grief that follows death is further explored in “after the obit” as the speaker ponders how “death exudes its own scent, but grief//is sensed in colognes wafting/from darkly-dressed handshakes,/in cups of too strong coffee.” The initial pains of death and funeral ceremonies fade, but grief remains afterwards “in the first time you make tomato sauce,/sense your mother’s absent hands/in the aroma of tomatoes stewing.” These are the unexpected ripples of grief that follow a loss, surprising and occurring when least expected. These pangs are not to be mapped or reined in by a contrived socially imposed timeline; the heart simply won’t have it.

Sgroi uses Latin consistently throughout her collection, and I found the glossary at the back of the book, with the translation of the names of species—for plants, birds, animals, and insects—was helpful. She plays with language throughout, with both English and Latin words, as well as with the idea of how the craft of writing and storytelling is not unlike the ways of the natural world, so that the reader begins to think about how language can be as fluid as the changing of the seasons. The two—language and nature—are carefully and artistically interwoven.

What is different about In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, structurally, is the inclusion of two reflective poems at the end of the book. “Binding” includes one poem, “of the first part,” which speaks from the first-person point of view, while the second poem, “In other words, two,” is written in third-person voice. Both are two sides of a coin, or mirrored likenesses, or perhaps even something like an overheard conversation between the poet and the natural world. In closing the collection with this dual-voiced, reflective piece, Sgroi offers her creative and poetic modus operandi. If the reader has any question of the poet’s intention, “Binding” offers some potential answers to questions that might have been posed in the reader’s mind. Best, then, to read the poems first, and then to arrive at the reflection having experienced the work of its own accord.

Renée M. Sgroi’s newest collection is one for gardeners, yes, and for those who love the natural world, certainly, but it’s also for those who want to explore the intersections that exist between humans and the natural world, even as it might be cajoled into the form of a backyard garden plot to offer a structure for contemplation. Here there are thoughts of what it means to be with the land, as settler, but also of how to live in concert (as best possible, and in good conscience) with the land and its creatures, plants, water, and earth. In a Tension of Leaves and Binding leaves a reader, then, with thoughts of how to be in the world, how to journey through this life, and how to find anchor points of comfort and contemplation in times when we recognize our temporal nature, our own mortality, and our responsibility to leave things better than we found them when we depart, rather than worse.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com