A small quiet voice in the dark: ecocide and lyric poetry (periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics)
July 3, 2025 § 2 Comments
I have a short essay out today in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics — many thanks to rob mclennan!!!
I am mindful that as I write this essay, the boreal is on fire across the prairies; thousands of people have been evacuated; there are fires too in British Columbia, Alberta, northwest Ontario. Last year was our worst wildfire season in recorded history; according to the New York Times, 7,100 wildfires burnt 37 million acres, “an area larger than the size of England.”[1] And this occurs amidst the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction and the on-going breaching of Earth’s planetary boundaries – topics I attempt to write about in my own poetry:
Camped out all day in the foyer of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science as snow falls.
A blank softness. Diffuse light. Drifts of people meet for coffee, then disperse.
I’m reading papers on the shore ice melting at Port Hope, on the tar sands and the toxicity
of the Athabascan river—a landscape resembling a war zone marked
with 200-foot-deep pits and thousands of acres of destroyed boreal forests.
This sticky viscous bitumen. This most destructive project.
The sea ice declines. Inuit elders say, Something has happened—the Earth has tilted
on its axis. The sun sets in a different place. The stars are not where they once were.(“Iridium,” A blueprint for survival, Guernica Editions, 2024)
In the face of such existential threat, lyric poetry seems helpless, pointless even, no more than a small quiet voice in the dark….
For the full essay: A small quiet voice in the dark: ecocide and lyric poetry (periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics)
kim trainor 
Kim,
I’ve been trying to find you since I read a few of your poems somewhere and then bought Karyotype. I’m the curator of a poetry series, Poetry on the Salish Sea, based in Port Townsend, Washington US, now in our third year.
I wonder if you’d like to consider coming here to read your poems in the spring 2026. March or April. I admire your work a lot and would be so glad to introduce you to audiences here.
Please let me know if you’re interested and the best way to communication with you.
Kathryn HuntArtistic Curator, Poetry on the Salish Seakathrynhunt.netkathryn@kathrynhunt.net
Here’s a couple of my poems to leave you with.
Threads
Roots of trees huddling beneath the soil like children. Fires eating air in the boreal forests. Siberia. Alaska. Vancouver Island. Canada in flames. On the Wyoming plains, a coal train halted on gleaming rails, stalled in the double-helix of indeterminate weather. Rails a shadow between one busted town and the next. On the blue planet I am walking — its surfaces, its depths, small animal that I am. The ache in my body, the shame in my ache. An old woman on a porch in the smooth wake of her day, not even a spool of thread in her lap to say hurry.
Encyclopedia of the Dead
Wind always moving, tugging at the fir branches,
scattering their needles. Beautiful
like rain, the way rain falls. Needles
tracked inside, little pencil marks
I try to erase with my broom. Bed
made smooth by my hand, cup washed.
Day already half gone.
On TV they are collecting bodies from rubble,
sooted with plaster and mud. Wrapped in white
cloth and shipped south, laid in
columns like the lined pages of a child’s
spelling book. Each two thousand pound bomb
making a cumulus cloud that towers
to the upper limit of breathable air.
Out my window the ordinary miracle of a mahonia’s
gold-plated candelabras in winter, blossoms from which
Anna’s hummingbirds drink. Each leaf knowing
when to flame red or turn buttery, when
to let go. To lie on the ground.
I have one hundred books to reshelve before nightfall,
small coffins of alphabets that have spoken to me
through decades and seasons and centuries. Treasures
new and forgotten resurfacing. They speak
of electricity and caves and sweet tea,
revolutions and Neolithic goddesses.
I sing the alphabet to deliver
each book to its right home.
Every day is a book lit up
like a body in love, or in death, with light
cast off from cold stars. The day comes and it passes,
dusk’s unfathomable blue. In this way I can bear to love
and grieve for the dead. Powdered with sand from their
once-upon homes. Though it is my own
dead outside the darkened windows
whose faces I see.
Many thanks for your kind note Kathryn — I’ve replied via Gmail. 🙂