Darwin’s Breath by Connie Jordan Green
Iris Press, 2018
Not since Mary Oliver’s Devotions have I read poems that stir such reverence for the natural world and our place in it. Connie Jordan Green weaves powerful personal narrative into a backdrop of science and mystery in her newest collection, Darwin’s Breath. The pages abound with moving work throughout three sections defined by the terms “evolve,” “grow,” and “nourish.”
In Part I, Darwin’s Breath, we observe the world up close, as Darwin did and as Green does so exquisitely. In the first poem, she immerses us in that enigmatic space merging fact with mystery, biology with spirit:
We are made of fragments—
amoeba into fish into amphibian
and mammal, the path
of our development the history
of the world. How then to speak
of the soul, wish for its whisper
as we skirt the ordinary
This section informs and delights with sacred life and evolution. “Rattlesnake Skin” startles us with “When God thought of wisdom / He envisioned the snake.” In the consecutive poems “Kin to Planets” and “By the Window,” Green’s words—always carefully chosen and placed like smooth river stones in a musical path of rich visual discovery—link us to earth and sky, known and unknown, “our finite centers yearning toward galaxies.”
Grapevine Woman, Part II, traverses seasons while noting life’s brevity. In “Approaching October,” Green writes, “I am old now, my soul smoothed / by the circling of the years.” She spreads a rural banquet: gardens and bean beetles, owls and woodpiles, and pure happiness from “sunlight stretching her limbs // over the long day.” The poet also paints leaner times, as in “January Lament” where we are “scourged and made whole by deprivation”—one of numerous sagacious gems in the collection. Again in “Vining,” she wields aging as a motif both calming and cautionary:
tight buds that, come fall, will burst
into a haze of white blossom, scent
the hillside, sweet as all last things.
Part III, The News We Hear, rightly contains the early framework for Green’s wisdom. Here lies the nourishment bringing the collection full circle. In “Parsimonious,” a child of Depression-era parents learns to “piece a life grown holy / with the rub and shine of use.” Yet the poet is far from naïve. “Girls on the Brink” warns of an adolescence both exhilarating and dangerous: “Young girls want / what has no name / a longing too large / for the pockets of their tight jeans.” And later in “Sunday Morning, Mid-July,” her own offspring elicit retrospective understanding:
around the fire, our children, heads bent
over books or board games, waiting
to grow up, wishing themselves into
something they cannot know not to want.
Connie Jordan Green bids us to pay attention and love all life, even the creatures that plunder the garden while we sleep. We must belong to this world, as she says in “The Invisible Realm,” with “a fierceness / that burns like a star.” Every poem in Darwin’s Breath draws an inquisitive breath and exhales enlightenment.
Cathy Ann Kodra’s poetry has appeared in RHINO, Saranac Review, Still: The Journal, Whale Road Review, Yemassee, and others. Her first full poetry collection, Under an Adirondack Moon, was released in October 2017 (Iris Press). Kodra works as an independent editor in East Tennessee.