Wilder

by Jemma Borg

What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an ‘extended sympathy’, and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as ‘the real world to which we belong’ and recover the means to save what we are destroying?

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Below the decorative order of our lives / is the green hum of the heart”. Jemma Borg’s Wilder is a collection of poems devoted to the lines between — diverging and connecting — what is ‘wild’ and what is ‘wilderness’, in its true sense, deriving from the obsolete verb ‘wilder’ (as in, ‘bewilder’), meaning ‘to lose one’s way’. The wild world and what is wild within us are ubiquitous, alongside a perpetual search for meaning, only further complicated by the state of the wild world as we continue to destroy it. But, in many ways and at many different points, even when it seems least likely, Borg responds to perpetual uncertainty with resolute hope, unique in each instance: “I won’t surface again / into the life I had before or call the dry land home / When we have finished with our confinement, / light falls from us like a skin”; “There is time enough for everything to happen”; “This is what innocence is: / carnal, almost blind, receiving”; “You are this breathing architecture”; “Even in a lineage of grief, life blooms”. But moments of despair are distinct: “You know you are alone in the world and always will be.” Favourites include ‘Shadows and warriors’, ‘The art of memory’, ‘Dissection of a marriage’ (seriously — just wow), ‘Aphids’, ‘Thread’, and especially ‘The honourable guitar’: “Music begins in the throat; it begins like regret […] It is accompanied, it is alone — / the heart cut to strings in its dark room.” Borg’s promise that “life blooms” and that earlier image of us as “breathing architecture” sustain me, along with her belief in the word: “She left fragments of text under a window to ripen and grow.”

[Alarie]

While I did enjoy some of Borg’s poems, I don’t feel it would be fair to apply a rating to this book. I prefer poetry that is more accessible, not so academic. I also prefer narrative poetry most of the time, but more importantly, I wasn’t giving this book enough attention to judge it. I was juggling several other books of different genres. For that reason, instead of making a critic’s judgment, I’ll just share a few passages that grabbed me.

From “Shadows and Warriors,”

“... Tell me, do you also think

when you hear the goats crying like children,

that mind is not ours alone,

but belongs to everything?...”


From “Forest of the Suicides,”

“…
Then don’t judge Grief – the savage –

can’t be kept exact like a stone

it wilders, it sprouts, it pushes up through

the plush valves of the heart, presses

the white tips of your toes towards

the earth’s red core, your jugular

brimming with sap, wood

replacing bone – and it keeps on

flourishing…”


And I especially love this metaphor from part 3. of “Three Storms:”

“…the clock’s / two swords will resume their reckoning….”

[TMB · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems brought me back to life. Giggling, grieving, dancing, earth-embedded life. Borg is a master of poetics, her voice both endearing and awe-inspiring. Highly recommend.