Book Review: Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham

Reviewed by Danny Caine

Cold Pastoral
Poems by Rebecca Dunham
Milkweed Editions, March 2017
$16.00; 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1571314789

Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Pastoral opens with a fitting epigraph from Muriel Rukeyser: “Carry abroad the urgent need / the scene, / to photograph and to extend the voice, / to speak this meaning.” It’s fitting primarily because Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead is a clear antecedent to Dunham’s docupoetics of witness. Cold Pastoral revolves around the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and Dunham, like Rukeyser, employs interviews and court transcripts to narrate the calamity. Rukeyser’s words stress the importance of looking and listening—the main concerns of Cold Pastoral, both in terms of their relevance and their limitations. When considering something like Deepwater Horizon, we have to look, to listen. But is it enough?  

The act of looking echoes throughout these poems; in the prelude poem “Mnemosyne to the Poet,” the speaker is “not permitted / to learn how not to look.” At the beginning of a sequence of poems about the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, we see the speaker’s “own / eyes stitched open” like those of a doll hanging from a tree. In “Elegy, Sung in Dirt,” the speaker declares, “I am the poet of the eye / filled with dirt.” Yet, as the book progresses, Dunham investigates and problematizes the act of witness. In “Field Note, 2011,” the first of three poems dedicated to Gulf Coast Oyster fisherman Wilbert Collins, the speaker sees a sign declaring that Collins’s oyster business is closed. As the speaker raises a camera to the sign, “a man / shouts, and idles his car. / Points to the sign. My father’s / out back. Go talk to him.” The son challenges the poet to do more than look. Here, a photograph alone isn’t witness. The poet must do more.

Much of the tension in Cold Pastoral stems from the question of what to do in the face of such disasters, and where blame lies (besides BP—Dunham is clear in assigning the most complicity to BP). Dunham crafts much of the investigation in the poems’ sequencing and the spaces between them. For instance, “Atavism at Twilight” embodies the voice of an unnamed ancestor who insists, “I swear we knew / Not what we did.” That poem is followed by “Black Horizon,” where a powerful central image shows “cleanup crews / [weaving] a path between beach towels, Hazmat-suited.” The next poem, “In Which She Opens the Box,” recounts the story of Celia Steele, the first woman to raise chickens for meat instead of just eggs. The three poems in sequence ask more than their individual parts: who is complicit, and what role does the past play, in today’s environmental disasters?

Ultimately, Cold Pastoral is an elegy, but a contemporary one. A post-elegy. In the long concluding poem “A Hive of Boxes,” Dunham writes, “The poet grieves not only a particular death, a particular extinction. She mourns the death of nature itself.” But these poems do not just look backwards. Elsewhere, in “A Hive of Boxes,” Dunham quotes Jahan Ramazani, who writes, “The modern elegist tends not to achieve but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss.” Cold Pastoral is both elegy and polemic, a powerful work that finds the poet unsure of what to do or who to blame (besides BP, of course). Cataloging this disaster mirrors the process of killing a Hydra, which Dunham uses as a metaphor for oil cleanup in “There lies the Hydra.” Yet in “Panel: A Poetry of Disaster” the speaker insists, or maybe asks, that “There must be some way to say this.” This is a book full of questions, implicating poet, reader, and corporation alike. It’s a book in which the poet can say, “Reading isn’t enough,” but also “Who will document the crisis that bleeds on and on?”

Danny Caine is author of the chapbook Uncle Harold’s Maxwell House Haggadah (Etchings Press 2017). His poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, Hobart, Mid-American Review, and other places. He’s Music Editor for At Length and a bookseller at Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas. More at dannycaine.com.