janna knittel

BOOK REVIEW: LINDA GREGERSON’S CANOPY

HarperCollins, 2022. 96 pages. $16.99

With the title Canopy, I expected more trees in this book. There are trees and ecological themes throughout, but much more, too. “Canopy” has multiple definitions. “[T]he uppermost layer of branches in a forest” (Oxford English Dictionary) is merely one. The meaning of shelter or protection resonates the most, since the book is as much about family and home as it is about the environment.

The first poem in the collection, “Deciduous,” focuses on trees, of course, but through metaphors about language and meaning:

Speak plainly, said November to the maples, say

            what you mean now, now

that summer’s lush declensions lie like the lies

            they were at your feet.

Plays on words such as “lie like the lies” frequent Gregerson’s poems and add rich layers of sound and sense to otherwise straightforward word choices.

            This poem addresses environmental destruction directly as well:

The child who learned perspective from the

            stand of you, near and nearer,

knowing you were permanent, is counting

            the years to extinction now. Teach her

to teach us the disciplines of do-less-harm. We’re

            capable of learning.

This poem therefore is about how the loss of forest canopies is catastrophic because they “harbor the greatest biodiversity of any habitat in the world” (Center for Canopy Ecology).

            Gregerson points out that the etymology of “deciduous,”—which means “to fall,” like the leaves of deciduous trees fall annually—“De + cidere . . . also means decide.” This poem ends with a reminder that, not just trees, but all life on Earth, are at a tipping point and human beings must move in the right direction or face extinction.

            Canopy as shelter is inferred in poems about family. In “Love Poem” (the first of two poems in the collection with this title), the speaker talks to her daughter about the loss of her sister, presumably to cancer, “the illness that had only left me bitten // took her altogether in its jaws.” She expresses a keening grief, with the lines, “[W]hat’s to become of me now / she’s gone. My sister, love, my one // and longed for only” and “I didn’t keep her safe.” Of her daughter, she says, “You said / because it has fallen on you to be my // comfort that’s your daily job.” The child becomes a canopy for the grieving mother.

            “Sleeping Bear,” named after Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, tells stories of Gregerson’s family and immigrant ancestors, interspersed with commentary on 21st-century refugees. In Michigan’s history, she says, “the shipping lanes were thick / with them, from Hamburg, Limerick towns / along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found // the work.” Work was either in timber or farming: “[O]ne of the routes was / lumber and the other tapped a prairie’s worth // of corn.” The word “immigrants” is never mentioned in these lines, only implied in “them” and how ships brought them from overseas. Those who survived passage over Lake Michigan were lucky, since it is known for rip currents, “and lakes like this / are deadlier than oceans: in / a single year the weather claimed one in every // four.”

            Though she emphasizes the formidable hardships European immigrants faced in previous centuries, the speaker also delineates how differently those immigrants fared compared to present-day refugees, for instance, how inured many Americans are to their plight:

What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in

                        until the body of a single Syrian three-

year-old lies face down on the water’s edge? Or

this

week’s child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes

                               with the back and then the heel of his

small

left hand (this time we have a video too) the

blood

congealing near his eye . . . .

She adds, “So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn / hearts,” as over and over the newsfeed shows such images but the United States does little to help. Later she recounts the signing of Executive Order 13769, which suspended admissions of refugees from primarily Muslim countries, a decision borne of Islamophobia, and that has resulted in tragedy for displaced people.

            “Sleeping Bear,” because of its multiple, interlaced themes, feels key to the collection. It loops further back in time to retell the legend of how the dunes and islands of the lakeshore were formed, the story of a mother bear whose cubs drowned in the lake during a crossing, a story of motherly grief to mirror the stories of Syrian child refugees. She acknowledges, however apt the story appears, “We are not / the people to whom the legend belongs.”

            Gregerson interweaves multiple themes in the longer, multi-part poems, so that “The Long Run” addresses how US soldiers were ordered to shoot civilians in Afghanistan in 2012; the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama; and environmental degradation:

At the turn of the century in which I was born

the topsoil here in Iowa was sixteen God-sent inches

deep. We’re down to half. Three tons lost

per acre per year because we like our groceries cheap.

Topsoil depletion is serious as it eventually will lead to a crisis in food production. It can be caused by intensive agricultural practices, short-sighted ways of using the land.

Gregerson writes, “I’ve sometimes taken comfort in the long run, in // the long run some worthier species will, fate willing, / inherit the earth.” In this complex poem, the horrors of war and domestic terrorism contrast with the resilience of some species, how ginkgo trees “coexisted with the dinosaurs. // A ginkgo in Hiroshima survived the atom bomb.”

            Notable aspects of the book include genre. Gregerson includes several ekphrastic poems. They describe and comment on works of art as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch’s The Haywain Triptych, an oil painting (“Not So Much and End as an Entangling”), and a soap-sculpture replica of an 18th-century statue (“Melting Equestrian”). That the poems engage with other forms of art—such as a gender-flipped casting of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (“Slip”) and an orchestral performance (“Fragment”)—as well as artifacts such as photographs at a historical site, gives a concreteness, an anchor, to a collection engaged with daunting events and abstract ideas.

            Variations in tone help keep the poems engaging as well. Poems about environmental degradation convey appropriate bitterness, such as how “Archival” describes the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic: “Assuming survival of people who / remember what the seeds are for // and something that passes for topsoil,” and “It must / have helped with costs a bit to build // the vault where once we mined for coal. / They’ll credit us with irony.” Yet humor appears, even in “Scandinavian Grim,” a poem about her mother’s impending death, when the pastor had

shown up at her bedside to pray

while we muted “Take the A Train” (her

                        favorite)

            and practiced the seven stages of

awkward.

And amid all the grief and loss, she can write a touching wedding poem (“Epithalamion”):

. . . The joy

            that has been

untouched by grief is precious and

            protectionless.

This chosen joy—Sweet lake, abide—is

            rarer still. And shared.

Canopy, despite encompassing pandemic fears, racial injustice, and global warming, as a whole is about how, not just to abide, but to live through it all. The speaker of “A Knitted Femur,” when trying to subscribe to an online listserv, is “asked to ‘confirm / humanity’” and says, “I checked the box.” The book asks its readers to confirm their humanity and protect the canopies that protect us, whether arboreal or familial.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janna Knittel is the author of Real Work (Nodin, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Janna has also published a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line, 2018), and poems in Blueline, Breakwater Review, Constellations, Cottonwood, North Dakota Quarterly, Pleiades, and The Wild Word and the anthologies Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology (Split Rock, 2018) and The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition, 2023).