Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Understanding the title term is important for this volume and the Merriam-Webster version is provided before the table of contents:
Refugia are areas of relatively unaltered climate that are inhabited by plants and animals during a period of continental climactic change . . . and remain as a center of relict forms from which a new dispersion and speciation may take place after climactic readjustment.

A few things took a while to sink in for me with this volume. One was the tone of grief regarding the changes to our planet, though she rarely speaks so broadly in her poems, which are mostly intimate observations of place. I would say the grief is not heavy but rather cumulative or more persistent as the poems progress.

The other thing that slowly crept up on me is that the concept of refugia subtly expands into language and culture as well as biology. As a whole this volume questions what we can and can't preserve, whether refugia is an ideal that is never truly accomplished. Even if pockets of non-change or limited change are possible, does that negate mourning the loss we see all around us?

Since I'm on Christmas vacation and have an easy way to keep the book open at present, I'm going to indulge in a long sample poem. Some of the spacing and line breaks are different from the original because of limitations within goodreads and my uncertainty about the intentions of some hanging indents in the poem.

The Carp Pond

*
I'm listening for bells, and the sound
of people spilling towards burial,

but all I hear are my children humming as they mound sand
on the gouge we call riverbed,

brightly hatted heads bent together
like two nodding tulips.

The sound of spring is so slight,

the water so scant and temporary
its first days are the same as its last.

What does this have to do with death?

I'm just telling a story about what happens
when rivers are held back.

The way willows green, slowly, and water flows, barely.

*
One hundred and fifty years ago, springs filled
the carp pond in the Archbishop's garden.

Behind the cathedral,
in the lot where everyone parked
at this morning's wake,
the pond
was a golden catch of sunlight,

the river held water, the water held
a wetland, thick with warblers
and soft-leaved herbs.

I know one young mother who,
like everything else,
is underground
and gone.

This should be the river singing to you,
but how, I ask, could she?

*
Thirteen people gather to mix the waters
of the world into a bowl.

Here is the Amazon River, here a spring on Crete, here
a cupful of our river drawn from the tap
of my kitchen sink.

Summer 1883, the river rose above its banks, flooded
the dirt streets of the plaza, dragged
cottonwood logs downstream.

At the archive, I trace the river's dry line
through a folder
fat with obituaries for its water.

Marshes, trout, floodplains that once spread like pearls
on a necklace worn by the woman
dressed in blue,

her song rustling willow, the shuish shuish
of a plastic bag caught on a water-
worn branch.

*
The carp pond was hung in willows
whose catkins beckoned bees,

laced in cattails with floating star-seeds.

Ponds are where water stares back at you,
rising from the dark below.

It's harder to miss a funeral than to go.

How else can the world come back to life?

Rise and whir of dragonflies
through the green-fringed door.

How full our wells once were.


This is a book that bears re-reading to get everything out of but I confess as a recreational poetry reader I am not gripped enough by her style to do that re-reading. However, if I were teaching a class in poetry in which I chose books for study, this might be one of them. For example, there are nine poems throughout the volume titled Refugia. How are they related? Do they represent a progression, etc? Is the number nine significant (the final number before returning to the cycle of 1)? Worthwhile questions that I'm not going to pursue because of my lazy recreational status and desire to simply move on and start on my 2020 twenty books--but I certainly encourage others in a more robust phase of their poetry engagement to do so.

That's not what I would have expected "refugia" to mean, but what a fascinating word (and concept)! I like the easy-to-read conversational tone of that poem. And I like the "definition" "Ponds are where water stares back at you." Thanks for sharing and reviewing!

I quite liked this poem also and may try to find this book.

I also really like this poem, and intend to look for the book.