The Sky Broke More turns ecopoetics to horror, a reminder that nature is incredibly vast and mysterious, and we are soft, small, and vulnerable in the face of it. A prescient topic, as the climate catastrophe kicks around in the back of my head, readjusting my relationship to nature with every natural disaster, every strange season. Garth Graeper’s work here is varied and razor sharp, a vast series of images and ideas displayed with laser focus. The use of white space in this collection is masterful, breaking up imagery and providing both mystery and closure. The Sky Broke More is comprised of three discrete sections, “Pioneers,” “The Dorothy Loops,” and “Homes.”
“Pioneers” is characterized by its sparse verse, the white space of the page accentuating the mystery of the text. There is a clear through-line for these poems, almost a narrative; a feeling of exploration, the speaker caught in a situation they don’t understand. Images of nature swiftly turn into violence and back again: “sprays of willow sap / and blood / squirms // a warm center / twisted in hundred- / year squalls” Blending together until nature feels violent and viscera seems beautiful. The tone of this section is incredibly reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film that Graeper notes as a direct inspiration in his interview with Air/Light Magazine. The verdant imagery mixed with the suspense of unknowable, invisible danger in every patch of tall grass turns my mind toward cinema, a specificity that grounds the short stanzas through concrete imagery, despite the abstract places the text brings us. “Pioneers” also explores how nature changes those who interact with it, often irrevocably. Both the speaker and their companion change because of whatever happened to them, even after they are rescued, escaping from the danger in the forest: “we ran ahead / past the tree line / and ended up / as the wrong people”
“The Dorothy Loops” leans away from the more mysterious/supernatural horror of “Pioneers” towards a new dialogue, a fascinating conversation between the speaker and Dorothy Wordsworth. There is something ghostly about this—reincarnation of the dead through literature, poetry that responds directly to the words of someone long gone. There are poems addressed to Dorothy, poems that feel like letters being sent back through time for her to read, establishing a connection that takes place beyond the boundaries of time and the physical: “This heartbeat is not mine alone / Two bodies walking / Two layers of sound in motion together, hundreds of years apart / words stored deep in muscle memory.” It’s a beautiful moment of recognition, of the speaker feeling connection with Dorothy. Other poems are written after phrases picked up from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals—“Still & unseen,” “Mountain Mass of Black Clouds”—small fragments of her journals spun into responsive poetry, an incredible work of intimacy and intertextuality. The horrors of the world do not disappear, but rather become more grounded, the mundane horrors we experience throughout life and history. Graeper’s use of sound is impeccable throughout this collection, but the passages in “The Dorothy Loops” particularly wove their way into my head. Not only is Graeper paying attention to the sounds of nature, mountains rumbling, leaves and grass moving in the wind, but to the bodily sounds of the self: the way that air rushes through the throat, the way we struggle to form words from our flesh. Nature is not a thing apart from us, but something we belong to. An easy fact to forget in the face of technology. “soft human / smell mixing with / the smell of dirt” The connection between the speaker and Dorothy Wordsworth cannot be understated: there is such feeling there, an ode so grounded that it feels as if Dorothy has read these poems, dialogue between ghosts.
The final section, “Homes,” is a combination of verse and prose poetry, the verse poems separated by five prose poems like bricks. The sparse, broken up images that we are used to remain, the prose poems read like montage: a series of images that are cut together, building into something greater: “I wake up, waving back to ancestors from the platform. / Three black crows. Signposts—of a decision, a variation, / a change of trajectory …” The imagery is concrete, often related through the abstract, a common through line that creates the larger image of the poem. It’s cinematic, and once again suggests ideas of poetic cinema, and therefore Tarkovsky. There is a loneliness in these pieces, the speaker is often an observer, remembering past conversations or sitting on the outside of new ones, seeking something: “A stone, a chunk of rusted metal, opaque green glass / smoothed by the sea. Totems sending out signals, drawing / me again and again to a place I don’t belong.” The pattern breaks at the end, a final poem in verse to finish off the whole work. A perfect endcap: “at the start of each cycle, new lungs, new air / harmonized with rivers and mud and branches / a cloudless bright blue, a scarlet bloom, a green / quivering across centuries, unafraid to spill.”
Garth Graeper’s approach to nature poetry is one of a studious observer of small changes, of how the grass responds to wind, and a deep knowledge of how precarious humans are in the face of it. While thinking about this collection, and what Graeper is doing with poetry, a particular Andrei Tarkovsky quote rattled around in my head: “Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.” Here, Graeper shows his awareness, small pieces of the work highlighting the attention he has for the world around him, from the mundane to the supernatural, from gorgeous vistas to disaster. Ecopoetics feels more and more menacing, as climate catastrophe seems more and more inevitable. After all: “caught between / tall lilacs, bodies spill– / what did you expect?”
Sky Broke More, by Garth Graeper. Brooklyn, New York: Winter Editions, May 2023. 120 pages. $20.00, paper.
evelyn bauer is a writer and bookseller living on stolen land in so-called “New England.” She is often found reading books and petting cats. You can find some of her other work at evelynbauerpoet.com, and her poetry has been published in such mags as fifth wheel, The B’K, Moist Poetry Journal, and Heavy Feather Review.
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