Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham (review)

In Cold Pastoral, Rebecca Dunham achieves the formidable task of underscoring today’s environmental concerns and man’s guilt thereof with the lyric pastoral. At her best, Dunham focuses on natural disasters, both overtly man-made and as a result of global warming. Her themes range from the wreckage and devastation caused by a severe tornado in Joplin, Missouri in 2011 to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010; from the 2017 EPA Roundup pesticide investigations of the Monsanto company, to the lead poisoning scandal in Flint, Michigan in 2016.

Skillfully she recounts the horror of the Deep-water Horizon’s well explosion, which killed eleven workers and badly wounded seventeen others. The poems concerning this disaster form the centerpiece of her collection, and are powerful in imagery and tone at describing the loss of both human and animal life, as well as the ecological impact, which continues to this day.

A poem such as “To Walk On Air (for Mike Williams, the last man to jump off the rig)” is riveting as well as emotionally moving:

Columns of flame and smoke uncoil   reptilian in the night, rubbing against the rig’s sides.   Across crest and trough, the serpent feeds on the fuel pooled   below—We’re going to burn up. Or we’re going to jump. And they   drop straight through its bodied heat, feet cycling air. Their boots   pierce cloud as they crash into sea stirred to wildfire.   A hand reaches out, gathering them in, as the rig boils black   and then curls back upon itself.

In a section from the poem “Blowout” Dunham writes:

heat and smoke erupting from the rig sun-star bright  a blast furnace the fire our only light  I crawled over rubble over a body  I could feel the droplets of air misting my skin  methane heard an ocean on fire  a deafening roar of lit gas

Dunham is a visual and visceral poet. She also works into her poems fragments of documents and investigative reporting to strong effect. The first poem in her Deepwater series is entitled “Initial Exploration Report: Macondo Well” and includes swaths of excerpts from the preliminary drilling reports. The heavy irony of these reports is self-evident:

Worst Case Scenario Determination: volume, uncontrolled blowout per day: 162,000 gallons of crude oil; a discussion of response to an oil spill resulting from the activities proposed in this plan is not required; a site-specific Oil Spill Response Plan is not required

It is unlikely that an accidental spill would occur from the proposed activities.

The poem goes on to list the sheer number of threatened or endangered species that reside in the Gulf of Mexico that could be affected by a spill. In the next breath however, Dunham, includes the following statement:

A discussion of the measures that would be taken to avoid, minimize, and mitigate impacts to the marine and coastal environments and habitats, biota, and threatened and endangered species is not required.

birds could become oiled

The arrogance and recklessness of a company such as BP Exploration & Production, Inc. is strongly illustrated in this poem. Of course, the oil spill did happen and that single word “unlikely” gathers that much more significance.

It is few poets who can master this blending of the political with the poetical, but I think Dunham is most successful. In the poem “Backyard Pastoral,” Dunham achieves the same political irony by the juxtaposition of official commercial statements and poetic narrative. A woman with her infant is spraying Roundup weed-killer in her backyard, after having taken steps to protect her son from the sun. This effort to protect is contrasted sharply with the revelations that the pesticide can cause cancer:

. . . To protect him from the sun.   Used according to directions, Roundupposes no risk to people, animals,

  or the environment. Just

Pump-n-Go: she starts in the backyard.   Got to get it done before . . .

And later in another stanza:

. . . Her son stirs. She pats   his back and keeps going. Later, she’ll read: Roundup can be the origin

  of a cancer...