Ars Poeticas

The title puts a plural on Horace's Ars Poetica, the ancient poem about how to write poems, and the book is built from a sequence of long poems each called an ars poetica: Coral, Scotch Broom, Bluebird-Ghost, Bison, Goby, Coral, Again, and a closing Acknowledgements. Spahr's starting point, as the publisher describes it, was Brecht's question about whether there will be singing in the dark times, which she went back to during years of accelerating species loss and a rising right wing populism. Brecht's answer was yes, there will be singing, about the dark times. These poems take him up on it. They sing of extinction and of politics, but also of coral, of what a pop song might still set loose, and of the love of comrades.

Each poem fastens on a living thing and lets the facts of that thing carry the argument. The first opens with a list: to write poetry after the Castle Bravo nuclear test, after so many feet of blast damage, after the Cold War, and then, without a break, after the anatomy of coral, its hard cup shaped skeleton, its stinging tentacles, the named zones of a reef. Scientific vocabulary sits beside political history and the plain question of what a poem is for. The lines are long, unrhymed and often list like, closer to an essay that keeps interrupting itself than to a lyric, and the voice is skeptical of its own medium throughout. Christopher Kondrich, reviewing it in the Washington Post, concluded that, despite her doubts, the book shows poetry can add a great deal. Christopher Spaide at Literary Hub called the seven meditations digressive and recursive, self questioning and self devouring.

It is a slim book, 74 pages, and a demanding one: readers who want a poem to console will be frustrated, since Spahr refuses to. Readers who came to her through This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, or who read ecopoetry and political poetry for argument as much as for image, will find her first collection in a decade worth the effort.