Martha Silano, This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024), Winner of the 2024 Blue Lynx Prize for poetry
A Review by Kathleen Flenniken
Editor’s Note: In tribute to the work of Martha Silano, we offer this review of her book in memoriam.
Martha Silano’s brilliant poetry collection, This One We Call Ours, takes on climate change, a subject too big for most of us to contemplate, and makes it human scale. We find ourselves guard down, grappling with our communal peril, and allow our hearts to be broken.
Silano’s poems have always been rich in images, facts, sly and sometimes self-deprecating humor—and deeply humane. She projects her voice and sensibility with such assurance and naturalness that her lines carry a watermark. It isn’t simply their filled-to-the-brim muchness, it’s her craft, music and assured rhythms, her gift for mixing high and low. Here is a passage from “Once,” summarizing the creation of our universe and solar system in a few genius lines:
All there was: stars and exploding stars seeding the universe
with magnesium and carbon, with graphite and diamonds.
All this, and what all else, collected into a pomegranitic
bulge that became our sun, that became the rocky planets
and the gaseous ones, that became the generous
light through pines, us and our armpit glands,
us and our Mother, may I? No, you may not. (17)
It looks simple, but it’s not. The skillful use of repetition, the perfect abbreviated lists, the adjective that won’t slip past my spellchecker (“pomegranitic”): a beautiful union occurs over and over between subject and sensibility in This One We Call Ours—here, the lightspeed of Silano’s lines and mind and the space-time magic of galaxy building. The collection becomes, through its accretive details and attention to beauty and catastrophe, an extended ode to our earth and the imperfect humans who defile it.
The book is divided into four sections representing the seasons, though Silano has renamed them. “Carry an Inhaler, Stuck Indoors with Air Purifiers, Air Quality Index Apps Season [formerly autumn]” opens the collection and it concludes with “Yearly 1,000-year Floods, 60,000 Wildfires, Fear of Heat Dome, Bacterial Lake Closure Season [formerly summer].” The poems often fit neatly into seasons: apple picking (from a tree about to be bulldozed) in fall, smoky air and vacations in summer. But the sections also give shape to the seasons of grief and remind us of the seasons of life. And even as the collection deepens with anguish for the changing world, it is lifted up by poems introducing a son and a daughter who bloom, by poems about children in the classroom saying the names of trees, flowers and birds.
Silano sets her poem called “Just before 25 fourth graders crouched beneath a table to be instructed on the imperatives of silence and calm” in the midst of a lesson on haiku, turning her students’ attention to a cherry tree in full bloom:
asking them to watch the petals
breaking free with each small gust,
to consider what the petals resembled.
Javier waved: Snow!
Addison wrote a forest is scary.
Some were whispering.
One was confused.
One asked Do we have to?
Then we were quiet like the petals
falling to the ground. (65)
Do you linger in the shower of quiet petals, then reread the ominous title containing the instructions for an active shooter drill? It adds new dimension to the “quiet” petals “falling.” And yet this poem is far more than social commentary. With its haiku-like stanzas and diction, it captures and yes elegizes an innocent moment between teacher and students just before the drill: the perfectly-pitched exclamations from nine- and ten-year-olds, including the crowning “Do we have to?” which is so truthful it’s funny. Truthfulness reigns in This One We Call Ours. There are no false moments.
There is as much beauty in the collection as loss and foreboding. As life continues for now and sea levels rise, there are still wonders to behold and record. In “Letter to a Post-Apocalyptic Cockroach,” Silano calls out humanity’s love for our world and our selfishness and carelessness, which are always hand in hand. “You probably think we hated frost, rime, grout, hail, icy rivers…” the poem begins, “…but you’d be wrong.”The speaker, addressing a time after “the humans were gone, / and the Earth continued to spin,” lists opportunity after opportunity to save ourselves, and sees just as clearly—despite, but also because of our love of Earth—we failed to take them.
This One We Call Ours is rooted in science. There are plenty of alarming facts embedded in Silano’s poems, but the book never collapses into accusation or anxious self-involvement. The people doing harm to our planet are the speaker’s people, and she implicates herself too, “Because the straight-up spike on the temperature chart is just as much my fault / as Standard Oil’s.” (Chaperoning My Son’s Marine Biology Class Field Trip on the 49th Earth Day). Claiming a share of the blame is one of the strengths of this collection. Another is an abiding love for Earth’s inhabitants. We humans take our truth in measured doses, if at all. There’s a better chance we’ll accept it if the messenger is as compassionate as Martha Silano.
Kathleen Flenniken is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Post Romantic. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Image, the Pushcart Prize and Poetry Unbound anthologies, and in the documentary film Richland, now streaming on Apple TV. Her fourth collection, Waking, will be released in 2025.