Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm is My New Favorite Eco-Grief Anything

I’m getting into my backlog of poetry books to be read and reviewed and/or shouted out. It’s also a great way to not slow down and try to enjoy the success of my own book, at all! Hopefully I’ll do that thing that authors do where they promote the shit out of their books and then fall into a deep depression once the high of that wears off, fingers crossed

Anyways, I really did just read an amazing book. Just: Five stars. Sometimes the stars align and it’s just a kill shot. I’m ded with admiration for what this book attempted, and what it accomplished. Sorry for the violent metaphor, but if there’s one thing this book is about, it’s about death and grief and violence—both the violence of human imprint and pollution, and the violent way our ecologies are adjusting to climate change and careless development. It’s also about motherhood, the evolutionary fear that parents are dunked in (and sometimes drown in) as they scan their environment for danger and the intrusive, violent thoughts that our brains use to help us prevent catastrophe.

These poems are profoundly grievous, grief-stricken, full of terror, and the eco-grief and parental grief and fears are articulated so well that—truly—I wept through half the book. Don’t let that deter you. I wasn’t ready to cry, I thought I was going to be reading a book about eco-grief and climate change, which yes does make me cry sometimes but I set myself up in my shade garden on a gorgeous day with a cup of coffee and was ready to be sandblasted by some tragedy but keep a critical distance. Reader: the critical distance vaporized.

Eco-grief and grief for loss within a family, with ongoing trauma, and a sense of being inside—not at all past—an enormous dislocation is a lot, but the poems keep you close, and you feel welcomed, without the book sacrificing anything on the altar of sentimentality. Of course, Wahmanholm is a great poet, and there’s not a hint of sentimentality (this is what I call language that is turned outward in an attempt to evoke emotion—hard to describe, but you know it when you see it). I guess you could call these poems intimate, although they also have a large scope. Each poem grasps looks down a crevasse of loss, sometimes in a very simple way (incredible prose poems based on a letter of the alphabet), sometimes within a very skillfully-wrought structure—like a series of erasure poems.

I have never read more devastating poems about ecological (or parental) disaster, or the intrusive thoughts that come with certain kinds of motherhood mental spaces. I recognized my own catastrophic thinking in them, both in my mother-self and my eco-grief. What good is catastrophic thinking? Partly, it’s an evolutionary tool to help us save ourselves. What if you already are suffering from these thoughts, yourself? Do you need to also READ POEMS about them? Possibly not! However, one of poetry’s greatest gifts is connecting two people who don’t know each other, but who suffer in the same way. The spark that is made there, with the “I thought I was the only one,” has the power to ignite a flame. Maybe it could be like this for you.