I became aware of the wonderful Willowherb Review, a London-based journal celebrating nature writing by writers of color, only after its publishing era came to an end. Fortunately there are five issues available online, each packed with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that is consistently striking, intriguing, and thought-provoking. Today I read two poems from Issue 5: Constellations. The first is by Annina Zheng-Hardy, and this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, but it has to do with translation.
The poem’s epigraph is a photograph, simply framed, of a sign posted on a tree trunk that curves against a backdrop of pine forest and mountains and sky hazy with sun. It is in English, first, and then, slightly smaller, in Chinese. The sign is blue, almost Yves Klein blue, while its contents are snow-white. The sign reads:
Forest such as
love, fire on every-
one.
The poet’s task, then, is to briefly yet insistently interrogate this translation, using her own Chinese as well as Google Translate, and giving us the opportunity to do the same by including the Chinese characters in the poem itself: 护林如爱家，防火靠大家。Google Translate is interesting partly because it’s eternally in flux, which means that my results were different from Zheng-Hardy’s: “Protecting forests is like loving your home, and fire prevention depends on everyone.” In fact, there is so much poetry to these two lines, AI-generated though they may be, and I especially love the sound and impact of the phrase “prevention depends.”
I love being guided on this double journey, along a trail I have never set foot on, and through a process of linguistic recovery and transformation that I can access only with the poet’s expert help.
So certain in its presentation, yet so unclear — fire
on everyone — it is both and neither command
nor declaration. Until I read the Chinese written beneath,
as context beside the painting, the author’s note
after the poem. 护林如爱家，防火靠大家。
This straightforward tone also really appeals to me in poetry, and these line breaks are clear and effective—it’s hard to argue with strong finales like “fire” and “command,” but these also work perfectly as breath markers.
Interestingly the language gets murkier as we come to understand the meaning of the sign. We’re supposed to help prevent fires, definitely, but how to imagine a catastrophe in such idyllic surrounds? The distance, the drift that follows this and floats away at the poem’s conclusion beautifully compliments its bracing opening, asking us to think beyond linguistic and cultural differences and reckon with the final limitations of our human thought.
The second poem is categorized as non-fiction at the top, but it reads like a spell, and because its spellbinding whirl of points and insights revolves around the question of what poetry is, and how to reach it, I thought of it as poetry throughout (then again, I am not someone who cares too much about genre labels, or other labels). A much longer piece, “A Discipline of Kindness” could be read as a list, a chorus, or, as I read it, an incantation, and it builds in power and heartbreak and hope with every earnest entry, simply phrased or intriguingly at odds with itself.
I thought the mysticism of this worked so beautifully with the casual prose of the explanations, as the poet introduces us to her location “at the end of the world,” in the Puget Sound, where she immerses herself in the past and present of indigenous peoples like the S’klallam, Suquamish, and Swinomish, while thinking of her own ancestors, ancient and recently lost, like her auntie, who in turn introduced her to essential rituals of poetry by teaching her how to access true names.
This is the key question of this piece, and one I loved and am fascinated by: What is the transcendental power of a name? Does everyone and everything have a symbolic heart that, with the correct attention, can be heard beating all the way across the universe?
“To destroy the sovereignty of a people, you must first destroy their name,” we read in an epigraph credited to “common knowledge.” White goes on to analyze her own names (“The name White is most certainly the name of the plantation owner, given to those enslaved on the land”), naming ceremonies of Yorubaland, place names, all while carefully considering the weight of a humpback whale’s heart (“about as much as the weight of three average adult human beings”). As she prays for the whales, she wonders:
How do we call to those who are refused a name? How do we sing to them? How do we say they are known?
Another thing in this piece that really resonated with me was its inquiry into grief, which comes back again and again in elegantly, almost as if by magic, reformulated positions:
Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an emotion that carries its own opposite within it. We only experience loss to the degree we experience connection to what we have lost. We only experience the death or passing away of a thing to the degree we have felt its vitality within and vitalness to us. We only experience grief to the degree we have experienced love.
This is so beautiful, and so rich, I feel I’ll go on thinking about it for a long time to come, especially as I continue to struggle with the grief of losing my father in November, a struggle I’m sure will continue for the rest of my life.