A Review of Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days — June 20, 2020 by Ben Rutherfurd
A review of Brian Teare’s lush, complex, and terrifying Doomstead Days might usefully be framed with a comment he made in an interview on the Nightboat Books blog in 2019. Commenting on the false “dichotomy between ‘the real’ and ‘nature,’” Teare notes “that the natural world is the largest and most fundamental part of the real, but that humankind—industrial humankind in particular—tends to treat it as a background to, and not the actual fabric of, the real.” Doomstead Days in part sets out to pull this backdrop into the foreground. To that end, it’s no surprise that the opening poem, “Clear Water Renga,”begins with a collision:
fog, error, radar failed :: the container ship hit the bridge tower hard ::
its hull split, spilled fifty eight thousand gallons of bunker
fuel oil :: November 7th, 2007 :: the next day it hurt
the eyes to walk dockside, wind bringing the sting of petrol ::
The verb that most snags my attention is the “bringing,” though it’s arguably the least active of the passage. Crisis—in this case the crisis of the Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay—functions as an augury, a breach not only in the system that hauls fuel across the sea but in the system of thought that separates self from world, the daily from disaster. The quotidian now contains the “sting” of that collapsed gap.
In this opening poem and throughout, Teare’s approach to these collisions is to create an exchange between perceived binaries. Composed of eight long poems, Doomstead Days is rooted, for the most part, in walking excursions through both natural and built environments: the headlands of Marin County, California; the city streets of Philadelphia; the rivers of Vermont. Histories are re-incorporated into their landscape, the paths of rivers winding beyond out of sight imagined and followed with almost unbearable detail—as when, ruminating on the Schuylkill River’s history, Teare’s envisions the migrating shad and striped bass
whose numbers turned
the green river silver
if color counts as
epistemology spring sun on the backs
of a thousand shad
is a form of knowing
local to another
century …
This project of knowing, of finding new modes of knowing, is central to the book. Teare concentrates apocalyptic worry in the minute, in the “blunted light / fat with ash that stuck / to our windowsills.” Readers will likely be reminded, most immediately, of the ecopoetry of Brenda Hillman (“Clear Water Renga,”the opening poem, is dedicated to her and Martha Serpas), but the trust in sustained attention to the physical world, coupled with a near perfect ear, echoes some of James Schuyler’s work as well. Let a handful of lines from Teare’s “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man)” serve as an example:
outside the Woodlands Cemetery, the struck deer a dark startle, white
underside stained, tail still raised in escape :: I write how a breeze stirs its fur,
seems like shallow breath, & a passing car flattens the arched cardboard, box
springing back after so it seems an animal on its side again,
Teare’s cradling of the moment becomes a kind of high-wire act of perception. Stepping back, we might appreciate how much the language contradicts itself, wavering between polarities: the “dark startle” with its “white / underside,” the tail “still raised” in death, and the breath that is only a breeze. It’s hard not to read “springing” as a pun, given how tensile the passage is, as though perception itself needed to be held down lest it leap among possibilities. Yet after we understand the object to be a box, our first impression pops back up, the specter of the dead deer superimposed on what we know to be inanimate:
its breath just some wind lifting paper skin, the white plastic bag I thought
was its signature undercolor ::
It isn’t so much the image itself on display as the wavering between revelation and withdrawal, the description always a step ahead of us, oscillating between object and organism. If, as Rachel Blau Duplessis claims, poetry is defined by “negotiating segmentivities (a.k.a. line and sentence),” i.e., the process of repairing what has been fragmented, this passage makes a case for it.
The above passage places us in an active role most prominent in the book’s second section, a twenty-page sequence titled “Headlands Quadrats.” Previously published as a chapbook with Doublecross Press, the poem takes inspiration for its formal structure in the quadrat, a gridded frame fused in ecological data collection, often in coastal regions. Mathematical by nature, the quadrat is an instrument of segmentation and rationalization. Its surrogate on the page, the couplet, stands as one of these small grids:
faster than predators on the trail I encounter
for the first time a coyote exactly the color of July
in these hills unhurried it turns to me full of bones
Highlighting stricture as a generative element, the sequence harkens back to some of the work found in Teare’s previous full-length collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, a book he wrote in response to the paintings of Agnes Martin. As Teare notes in the first few pages of this earlier collection, Martin could be said to have discovered her voice in the 1960s on using the grid, a form that could engage “the tension between mathematical precision and hand application.” Though seen by some as an exercise in minimalism, Martin’s use of the grid was, according to Teare, “resolutely metaphysical.” While quadrats may seem more physical in nature, something of that previous book has carried over. While the gestures of the hand may not be caught, certainly we find the movements of the mind. As a kind of counterbalance to their framing device, the lines themselves slide about, unimpeded by punctuation, often shifting the lens with a mid-line zip-pan. Fleet as they are, what in the sentence might come off as stilted or irreverent feels delicately pitched so as to seamlessly connect observation to declarative:
off the ridge above a tourist pisses a relief
to be in a landscape where purity isn’t possible
sacred profane a pain in the ass mostly
In the most effective moments of these quadrats, we witness a balancing act similar to what we saw in “Toxics Release Inventory.” While it may be contained, the imagery is never static. But the setting of the sequence, the Headlands Center for the Arts in Northern California, lends its own set of connotations to the poem’s form. Home to SF-88, the fully restored Nike missile site, the headlands are marked by the industries of war. When Teare registers the local eucalyptus, calling it a “non-native invasive / flammable camouflage the army / planted to hide the fort,” he juxtaposes the lingering signs of colonization with a sense of peace:
military housing designed to fold
the soldiers’ bodies into the landscape
pastures shorn by horses grazing
It’s rife territory for considering not just the collisions between land and scientific methodology, but also those between land and the indelible stamps of war. And to a large extent, it is that very rational—Western, masculine, militaristic—treatment of nature that has long been responsible for ecological degradation.
The length and formal intricacy of many of these poems engenders a discursive lyric that is sometimes diaristic, at other times documentary. The more interior poetry of previous collections such as The Empty Form and Companion Grasses (the former being largely a meditation on illness) has given way to a need to speak, directly and at length, to the impending doom numbering our days. This is not to suggest that such a project prevents moments of personal reckoning and self-reflection. Nor does it exclude moments of sublime beauty. But the sense of urgency is undeniable, and with that urgency comes the acknowledgement of one’s own involvement in the ideologies that have brought us to this moment. To make that acknowledgment is to open oneself up to painful connection with the world, poisoned as it is:
& know I’m not
supposed to posit
an analogy
between the river
& my body but
courtesy of this dam
the city siphons
its water into me
another human
intervention
As though Teare had found a form for the body’s porousness, his brief lines move as fluidly down the page as toxins filter into and through natural settings, coming to rest in the body:
so we’re related
on a molecular
level so intimate
I think I can say
it wants speed
& movement free
enough to jump
the strained relation
to human needs
That porousness, as Teare suggests, fundamentally alters the terms by which we speak of a “pathetic fallacy,” as late empire complicates the binarism upon which such a fallacy is built. The supposed risk of sentimentality is beside the point; in the incalculable intermixing of the Anthropocene, where “each of my cells / [is] a little prison / the river sits in,” to speak on behalf of our surroundings might be less presumptive than it is inevitable.
