by Hunter Larson

The paradox of fire is that it is both destructive and utterly captivating. Have you ever seen a volcano erupt in person? I imagine it’s breathtakingly beautiful. I could spend hours watching volcanic eruptions on my phone, jetties of lava painting the sky in apocalyptic reds and oranges, the total sublime light of natural disaster. I remember a bonfire night last autumn, staring at the flame, watching it mutate, distort, like a kind of particulate void, and getting the urge to jump inside it. We fear fire but we desire fire; it’s ingrained in the ancient parts of the heart. Imagine the heart as a tapestry in flames; and as it burns, the charred edges reveal the beauty and ephemerality of living. Maria Sledmere’s new collection Cinders is interested in that burning tapestry of humanity.

What does it mean to write poems in the anthropocene? Sledmere addresses the poems themselves ‘All the poems tagged “anthropocene” / take off your jackets, take a seat’. As the planet burns, how do we proceed with the work, the work of poetry and the work of the lyric; and what is the point of continuing when ‘It is so sinister to exist here and now’. For Sledmere, the answer is the very fact that we’re alive, that the song continues regardless of what’s on fire. Her chosen methodology is the lyric mode, the cinders of language itself; and with a spiky virtuosic control she holds the cinders up to her lips and blows them out over the landscape in a ‘hot showering / prize of light.’ Acidic, barbed, but tenderly applied, Sledmere’s lyric confronts both the dualities of fire itself and the dialectic lived reality of life under capital. With an aptitude for cosmic vision, she positions herself and her readers beneath a sky forever opening out, laying on the lawn binge watching burning clouds, in love with everything, despondent because she, and therefore we, deeply care—but also laughing at just how beautiful it all can be when you’re totally irrevocably in love with the world, even when it’s irredeemably fucked. Or as Sledmere writes, ‘I love, I binge. / It is rare.’

The book begins with an epigraph by poet Rob Kiely, “The only ethical consumer is fire”, which sets us up for an exploration of the ethics of consumption on both capital and cellular level.“Browsing Amazon for heaters makes me feel warmer / and closer to space itself” she writes in ‘Prime Nerves’, acknowledging the way the systems of corporate governing—which the contemporary poetry apparatus loves to hate (and loves to write about how much it hates)—have become so enmeshed in our emotional realities that our inner lives are owned by ‘tawdry billionaires / driving bad starships’. I trust Sledmere here because she’s not afraid to admit that these paradoxes present us with an opportunity to better understand our own ethical positioning; to better understand how to approach something that both commodifies our interior life and brings us material comfort. I trust a poet who acknowledges our shared implication in the vast machinery of the capitalist death drive. The poem ends with the line ‘I perfect nothing’, a fitting declaration for both poetry and life; serving as a kind of guiding philosophy for this book. Perfection is, after all, totally boring. As Alice Notley once said “let’s improve this poem by making it longer and a mess”. Sledmere’s poems are messy in the beautiful deliberate way that Bernadette Mayer or Notley’s poems are—which is why they feel so alive, peopled with the incidents and contexts of everyday life in modernity. ‘My infelicity is a bad gateau / sulking on the stepmother’s counter.’ Through the prism of paradox, Sledmere compromises nothing, creating a multivalent lyric inquisition of both social and material capital, all scaffolded by the muscularity of her lyricism, the way it’s constantly turning, shifting, deflecting, and letting the world enter in flashes, ‘suffused in cheap hot language’, 

In ‘Sonnet for Bambi’ Sledmere writes, ‘I have paid so much for my hair / I wish I could save my mother’, a quiet revelatory juxtaposition that feels both public and private; highlighting yet another paradox, this time at the root of fashion and beautification. With moments like, ‘my ribboning heart / princessed with want’ and ‘the rat king of my nylons / as they come out of the washing machine / screaming’, Sledmere deploys a kind of high-femme lyric I that simultaneously acknowledges the power of appearance and the ways in which we can internally and externally elevate ourselves through controlling social perception; but also capital’s interest in how much money we collectively pay for socially mediated constructions of beauty, finally interrogating the ways in which the constant anxiety of appearance results in interior rot or psychic decay, ‘Lightly, I have eaten the spider eggs; / candied blemishes don’t add calories’. This is particularly felt through the mother-daughter dyad set up throughout the collection. She later writes ‘I check my email everyday like a dutiful daughter’, the dutiful daughter being the poet, uniquely capable of memorializing or eulogizing the figure of the mother. Throughout the book, the anxiety of  ‘Another petrified motherhood / hangs from the clove and cinnamon bundle’. In ‘Remorseless Waltzers’ she writes, ‘I have lost a lot of weight in the dream / am less like a person, more like a wound’. I read this wound as the background noise of loss or absence both global and local, environmental and personal, through which the mother-daughter relationship gets framed. Whether the loss is physical or psychic, it’s perpetually felt as a kind of low vibration beneath the poems in this collection. 

The final poem in the book is the magnificent ‘The Way to Keep Going in Arcadia’, both a nod and dedication to Bernadette Mayer. The poem takes Mayer’s ‘The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica’, and pushes it quite literally beyond the stratosphere and out into space, ‘Stronger than the NASA retrospective / you could fit this heart in a star ship’, she writes, mimicking Mayer’s heartswept landscape, but looking beyond this planet to Mars, often a site for so much human utopian longing, and also the technocrat’s Planet B: the perpetual answer to “where will we go when we’re finished with this one’. But ‘Who ever heard of utopia?’ she writes; in this poem, there is no utopia, only the surface of Mars, ‘gullied by dry ice, lubricated / by dreams of human exhaling, the dance / of once-skin, formerly-rock, fka meteor.’ If, for Mayer, Antarctica represents the barren arctic tundra of facing life itself, in all its anguish and total beauty, then Sledmere takes this notion to the extreme—to the vacuum of space itself. To set the poem up in Arcadia, both a vision of the ultimate pastoral and the poet’s native Scotland, and then to render Arcadia as Mars is perhaps the ultimate paradox; and yet, there’s so much beauty in space—remember, that’s where heaven is. The celestial music of the spheres, what Kepler called the ‘Musica Universalis’, is at play here, and that’s something you can only really hear in your soul, ‘the end of all things in a lovelorn song / melody’s permafrost stuck in my throat.’ And it’s a devotional poem too! The best kind of devotional lyric—one that in addressing the beloved also addresses life, love, poetry, the world, and literally Mars/Arcadia itself, ‘I kiss / the nape of your frozen brow / interplanetary crockery / we make dust together’. Everything coalesces in the final moment of the poem, where the interplanetary music hums in tune with the internal voice of the speaker. Here, the poem achieves a kind of alchemical register, a braid of song shot through with both the internal rhythms of the heart, and the universal music of the lyric address:

if spherical words surround us
the special melancholia of all life here
rising all the time with our hearts within
clear membranes
traces what’s always been, Mars
if I sipped the solar ale of you
not to speak
    not to sing
      keep warm
      this isn’t the journey

The poem ends with a negation of the journey, i.e. the journey is the paradox of life, and perhaps the journey then is the poem; a way to keep going, a way of building a life in a place that is inhospitable to both poetry and people, a world that is perpetually on fire, overseen by cartoonishly evil autocrats hellbent on crushing beauty and quantifying the fabric of the literal soul, this poem, and Sledmere’s collection as a whole, offer a way to keep going; namely, through the paradox of love itself. Or as she puts it, ‘To keep loving is to be in grief’.