Canopy

Poems

Linda Gregerson

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780358622253
• eBook ISBN: 9780358671046
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Literature

A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from “a contemporary master”*—a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment *Los Angeles Review of Books

Linda Gregerson’s long-awaited new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, “in a world where every breath I take is luck.”

From the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost, the poems ask: How does consciousness relate to the individual body, the individual to the communal, the community to our environment? How do we mourn a loved one, and how do we mourn strangers?

The magnificent poems in Canopy catalogue and reckon with humanity and the natural world, mortality, rage, love, grief, and survival.

In a world of overlapping crises, how does a poet bear witness?

• Ecopoetry for a Planet in Crisis: From the Global Seed Vault under permafrost to the quiet dignity of a single tree, these poems confront the radical fragility of our shared environment.
• Contemporary American Poetry: Capturing the last tumultuous decade with unflinching clarity, Gregerson gives voice to a nation grappling with police brutality, a global pandemic, and political division.
• Poems of Grief and Witness: Asking how we mourn both loved ones and strangers, these poems navigate personal loss alongside public tragedies like the Syrian refugee crisis.
• Unflinching Political Poetry: With a fierce, big-hearted eye, these poems challenge readers to reckon with the moral complexities of our time, where, as one poem reminds us, "every breath I take is luck."

Sleeping Bear

(SLEEPING BEAR DUNES NATIONAL LAKESHORE, LEELANAU COUNTY, MICHIGAN)

1.

The backstory’s always of hardship, isn’t it?

No-other-choices and hoping-for-better

on foreign shores. A minute ago, as measured

by the sand dunes here, the shipping lanes were thick

with them, from Hamburg, Limerick, towns

along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found

the work. The Michigan woodlands hadn’t been denuded yet

(a minute ago) so one of the routes was

lumber and the other tapped a prairie’s worth

of corn. There’s a sort of cushioned ignorance that comes

of being born-and-then-allowed-to-live-in-

safety so I used to think it must have been more

forgiving here, less brutal than the brutal North Atlantic

with its fathoms and its ice. But no.

The winds, the reefs, the something-to-do-with-

narrower-troughs-between-the-waves and lakes like this

are deadlier than oceans: in

a single year the weather claimed one in every

four. We come for the scale of it: waters without

a limit the eye can apprehend and—could

there be some mistake?—aren’t salt. Dunes

that dwarf pretension which if falsely consoling is right and

good. Where commerce lifts its sleeping head.

If I had the lungs for diving I expect I’d be there

too among the broken ribs and keels. Visitors need

a place to sleep and something to fill up the

evenings, it’s natural, the people in town

need jobs. Calamity-turned-profit in tranquility. My

father’s father’s father was among the ones

who did not drown. Who sold his ship

and bought a farm.

2.

What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in

until the body of a single Syrian three-

year-old lies face down on the water’s edge? Or this

week’s child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes

with the back and then the heel of his small

left hand (this time we have a video too) the blood

congealing near his eye then wipes (this is a problem,

you can see him thinking Where?) the hand

on the chair where the medic has put him.

So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn

hearts. In alternative newsfeeds I am

cautioned (there is history, there is such a thing

as bias) that to see is not to understand. Which (yes, I know,

the poster child, the ad space, my consent-

to-be-governed by traffic in arms) is true and quite

beside the point. The boy on the beach, foreshortened

in the photograph, looks smaller than

his nearly three years would make him, which

contributes to the poignancy. The waves have combed his

dark hair smooth. The water on the shingle, in-

different to aftermath, shines.

3.

There was once, says the legend, a wind-borne fire or as

some will recount it a famine and

a mother bear with her two cubs was driven

into the lake. They swam for many hours until the

smaller of the cubs began to weaken and,

despite all the mother could do, was drowned,

then the second cub also, so when the mother reached

the shore which then as now betokened

a land of plenty she lay down with her face

to the shimmering span whose other side was quite

beyond her powers of return. The islands

we call Manitou, the one and then the other, are

her cubs, she can see them, we go to them now by ferry.

We are not

the people to whom the legend belongs.

4.

And even on my city block. There has always been suffering,

both little and large. But does it

compare to mine? Yours is nothing.

I saw the woman running. I heard her scream.

You did nothing.

She said please she said help me we all stood still.

You all stood still. It took us a minute to figure it out,

by then they were down

the street. And then? The men were on bikes,

I didn’t think that happened here. That wasn’t

my question. Whate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Publisher’s Note
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Deciduous
• Love Poem
• Saint Sorry
• Variations on a Phrase by Cormac McCarthy
• Melting Equestrian
• Bearded Iris
• The Wayfarer
• Sleeping Bear
• The Long Run
• Not So Much an End as an Entangling
• Love Poem
• Horse in a Gas Mask
• Fragment
• Archival
• Interior, 1917
• Epithalamion
• Ram of the Week
• Narrow Flame
• If the Cure for AIDS
• A Knitted Femur
• Slip
• Uncorrected Vision
• Scandinavian Grim
• Environmental
• When Nothing but Tree
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Linda Gregerson
• Copyright
• About the Publisher