In her book of poems, Songs for the Land-Bound, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza begins with nighttime. In “Nocturne,” she writes “Somewhere in September, the river’s/quiet lapping; the night/edged in branch black, the sky ink blue,/the first migrating birds” (1). Two people (I thought of a husband and a wife) curl together under the stars and watch as “a thousand birds above/steered south by stars or specks of magnetite” (1) fly above them. “Nocturne” is organized by couplets. Quiet enjambment softly carries the reader through the scene. The speaker wonders if the same material that steers these birds south, also keeps this “flightless” (1) “land-bound” (1) couple who are “sun-warmed/stones” (1) together: “the years like fingerprints/we’ve left upon each other’s bodies” (2). We get the first narrative thread of the collection–domesticity and marriage amid the natural world.

A few pages later, we find ourselves groggy and in a poem about the morning. In “Anthropocene Aubade,” Garcia-Mendoza writes, “Morning again & again the weeping angle of the light/threatens to level me” (5). In “Ode to Fog” she shines a light on the predicament that both the poet and we are in: “This could be the end of the world” (9). Garcia-Mendoza uses the form, the aubade (a poem appropriate to the dawn or early morning) to confront the complicated relationship of humans to nature. In “Anthropocene Aubade,” she uses a line from an Amazon box (italicized), “Another day awake, alive/& what more would it take me to love/this world, box doubled as last-minute diorama?/I mean love it like an amnesiac,       love/even its absences, its sorrow-widening light” (5). Have we turned the natural world into a diorama that we look at, lament, possibly take a photo of and then move on with our human lives? This beautiful book of eco-poetry is asking us to confront both the wonders of the natural world and the grief of all we have lost. 

* * *

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza reminds me of Emily Dickinson, a poet who lived at a time in American history when industry was taking over nature. In a letter to Dickinson’s brother’s wife and her possible lover, Sue, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Those that are worthy of Life are of Miracle, for Life is Miracle, and Death, as harmless as a Bee, except to those who run.” Just as bees swarm through Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, the natural world is stitched into Garcia-Mendoza’s poems so beautifully, you want to touch the hemlines. Dickinson writes of death as a bee, something “harmless” except that it could sting you. Garcia-Mendoza also seems to be confronting death when she writes, in “Frog Song,” “Call life what it is:/a cycle; say the sky/is just another word for water.” In section five, the speaker of the poems, “the mother-poet” (53),” writes of a “darkened-room, in pediatric cardiology” (55) where her “son lies atop a papered table” (55). This poem ends with Garcia-Mendoza speaking of a state of “dread and marvel” (56). It is an echo of the “awe & grief” (5) and “grief & wonder” (4) that we see in the first section of the book.

* * *

What happens to you when you fall in love with a book of poems? It happened to me as I carried this book with me to the quiet forests of upstate New York where my husband and I are building a house. Sitting at the dining room table, I read the “magnolia mixed with woodsmoke;/bouquet of mint, rosemary, thyme; tonight/the garden not yet spent” (2) and I quietly annotated it in pencil: “gorgeous sensory images”. As my toddler daughter sleeps in the cotton sheets of her crib, I read, “The mother–like any wild thing–/fixates on surviving” (41). Ever since giving birth, I have felt more wild, more connected to the wilderness of life. In the poem, “Instructions for the at-Home Poet,” Garcia-Mendoza writes, “The mirror fogs beneath/your breath, no matter what you ask of it. . .pair the socks in couplets” (35). It’s as if poetry making and domesticity are made out of the same thing–something I think of as a fog, a nearly invisible substance that entwines in the air around our bodies. Garcia-Mendoza celebrates this state of water in “Ode to Fog.” She writes of the speaker almost playing the piano but not quite striking the keys. The world outside is “that charged kind/of quiet–incense, smoke, sigh–barely/solid” (9). I love the fog in this book. It unfurls around all of the wonder and the grief of being a human in a natural world that we are, plainly, failing.

The poet and scholar, David Baker, wrote in his book, Heresy and the Ideal, “The poet’s purpose is to establish, represent, and articulate mystery. The critic’s purpose is to analyze and interpret–and sometimes deepen–such mysteries” (282). And, this is what I hope to do in this essay: deepen, rather than explain the mystery. 

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza wrote a book of songs for the land-bound. So, what is the difference between a song and a poem? Perhaps it is that a song punctuates silence differently. In an essay published in the Boston Review, Matthew Zapruder, posits that poems are surrounded by silence, while songs are surrounded by “musical information.” Garcia-Mendoza seems to answer this question differently, “Think of language as some romance/with the unreliable, a rabbit hole down/the time-lapsed night inside of you” (4). Language, nature, motherhood, being a land-bound human in this wonder-full world, this collection of poetry articulates both the awe and the grief of the human and nature connection. “Call it/music, all of it” (75) she says, as she punctuates silence with birdcall, frog song and the music of our human lives. 

Subscribe For The Latest Publications
We’ll send you only the best works from our selected authors.