How does a poet tackle climate change, the daily destruction of life on our planet? How do we balance doom and gloom with resolve and reverence? Enter Martha Silano’s new book, This One We Call Ours, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. Silano brings an intimate knowledge of the natural world and her prowess as a poet to evoke our deepest feelings of grief and love for our Earth and all its inhabitants.

Silano puts us in our proper place right from the start. In her prologue poem, “What They Said,” we are reminded that our planet is one among 100 billion, a tiny speck in the universe. But she situates us there from her stance as a fellow human, trying to grasp what all this immensity means: “all these words / I didn’t understand.” In a book full of the science of creation and extinction, we are invited to learn and marvel right along with the poet.

Silano sets her readers face to face with the reality of all that has already, irrevocably, been lost. In “At the Burke Museum,” she writes: “I’m woozy with the ramshackle mess of miracle, catastrophe, / impermanence−how suddenly a species can be gone.” She lays it on the line in “Love Song for the Anthropocene":

Clever as always, Silano makes me smile even at this dire pronouncement, as she switches from the meter of the dactyl to the last line in pounding spondees.

Just when we think we can’t bear one more bit of evidence of our coming extinction, Silano assuages us with humor. In “After Apple Picking, Late Anthropocene,” considering the time after humans have destroyed ourselves, we get “Mother Earth / will heave a great sigh, crack open a Bud.” Some of the humor is dark, like the section titles where she renames the seasons, e.g., “Carry an Inhaler, Stuck Indoors with Air Purifiers, Air Quality Index Apps Season (formerly autumn).” Some is wild understatement, some breathtaking leaps from the cosmos to the kitchen sink. In “Nine Billion Years After the Big Bang,” she explains the origin of Earth:

Silano is a masterful poet, author of five previous books and winner of many prizes. She uses all her mastery to reach us, to break through ignorance, ennui, nonchalance about what is happening before our eyes. Her images are unexpected and completely devoid of sentimentality: “[…] On the inside / I’m just me: heart beating / like a garbage truck backing up your street.” She employs anaphora and irony, as in “Happy Holidays from the Everglades,” where the repetition of “I give you” beats a dreadful drumming into our ears: all this beauty and all this destruction are ours to own. She writes from the point of view of an orca in “Self-Portrait as Southern Resident Orca”; if we won’t heed scientists or activists, would we please listen to the voice of the orca?

I once heard a poet say that to write about hard topics, the writing must be beautiful, or no one will want to read it. Silano indeed makes it beautiful. She takes scientific information and shares it with us so that the stunning realities of our world emerge. She praises this earth we get to live on, as in “Why I Love to Garden in My Front Yard”:

Silano sprinkles these poems of praise throughout the book, so our appreciation of our planet and the ordinary pleasures it brings lives alongside our despair and grief.

While Silano doesn’t allow us to indulge in unwarranted optimism, there are also glimmers of hope, especially when she interacts with children. One of my favorite poems is “Chaperoning My Son’s Marine Biology Field Trip on the 49th Earth Day.” She perfectly riffs off Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” to plead for space for the students to explore and wonder about our Earth instead of being told to stick to the “laminated list of habitat types.” The kids aren’t daunted, though:

Towards the end of the book, Silano allows herself a moment to hope that humans could forget greed and small-mindedness and change the trajectory we’re on. In “If We Were Not So Single-Minded” she writes:

Silano’s love for the natural world and for all beings in it leads her to rely most of all on our connections, as in the penultimate poem, “We Are All Magnificent”:

Silano doesn’t make a direct call to action in her book, but in reading it, how could we not be moved? As we enter an even more perilous period that could seal the deal on extinction, I hope Silano’s words stir many people to activism and inspire those who are already engaged. Read this book in your book club, even if the members don’t think they like poetry. Gift it to your neighbors, regardless of their politics. And all the while, love the squash blossom, bite into sunshine.