The Names of Animals I Have Loved by Alexis David
dancing girl press, 2019
In their preface to The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013), Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street write that while ecopoetry “has no precise definition and rather fluid boundaries,” it can be said to explore “through language the manifold relationship between the human and other-than-human world.” Alexis David’s chapbook The Names of Animals I Have Loved works in this tradition, reflecting on humans’ place in larger ecosystems both physical and emotional.
In Part One of the collection, David states that her goal is to create a “curated exhibit of / appealing moments” that offer temporary “refuge” from the “haunting times” in which we live. As such, many of the poems center on quiet, intimate settings and the bonds formed there between humans and other species. In “A Letter to My Grey Cat,” David writes:
Why do you love the dining room table, my dear grey cat?
Why do I find you sitting so comfortably, with your litter smelling
fur, right on the spot where we eat our mustard chicken?
Does the table bring you little moments of joy?
Does it whisper secret parts of yourself to you?
Fisher-Wirth and Street might categorize poems in this vein as “nature poetry,” writing they say draws inspiration from nature as an external phenomenon, one that is yet separate from the human speaker. Other poems in the collection participate in the thread they call “environmental poetry,” writing that focuses on the plight of nature and humans’ role in its destruction. For example, in “Petrichor is the Smell of the Earth After Rain,” David’s speaker simmers with rage as she stares at a parking lot, even as she admits her own implication in its existence:
I hate
parking lots. look at them. how have
we not failed? how have we not turned
all that is good into absolute shit? you
need more proof?
David contextualizes the poetry in Part Two of her collection as “less of a refuge, / more of a call out to the night,” and the tone shifts accordingly. Her speakers are unable to provide answers to the difficult questions raised by topics ranging from infertility and adoption to consumerism and white privilege, much less their intersection with environmental sustainability. The chapbook is willing to sit with these questions, calling out not in a desire for closure or finality, but in self-interrogation and the pursuit of ongoing, non-exploitative interconnectivity with others. In this way, the poems touch on what Fisher-Wirth and Street call a third category of ecopoetry, “ecological poetry,” which they say challenges the notion of the “singular, coherent self.”
Ecopoetry is a still-burgeoning field, one that clearly eludes tidy definition. Yet, as Fisher-Wirth and Street state, one important feature of the genre may be its ability to help readers “engage in and slide between contemplation, activism, and self-reflexivity,” and in The Names of Animals I Have Loved, David’s tender, compassionate poems invite all three. “[W]e are all sharks, / sometimes,” she writes, but “I don’t think sharks need to die.”
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Catherine Kyle is the author of Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and six shorter collections. Her writing has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Mid-American Review, and other journals, and has been honored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and other organizations.