The Carrying by Ada Limón (review)

From the first poem, Ada Limón's latest book gives us particulars: In "A Name," Eve walks among—and names—the "nightingale, red-shouldered hawk / fiddler crab, fallow deer," and in the next poem, "Ancestors," the voice distinguishes "chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar, //one thousand oaks." These dense, satisfying lists are one of Limón's few extravagant (or verging-on-extravagant) syntactical gestures; overall, though, there is a curious but effective austerity in her work: themes are vast while the tone is measured, declaring dispassionately in "How Most of the Dreams Go:" "Sometimes, he drowns. / Sometimes, we drown together," or in "Ancestors" which, after that list of flora, turns to implications of silence and stillness:

        Later, I remember leaves, through car windows,through bedroom windows, through the classroom window

the way they shaded and patterned the ground, all that        power from roots. Imagine you must survive

        without running? I've come from the lacing patterns of leaves

Such elegant spareness serves Limón well, especially in darker autobiographical poems—and there are a number of those: about chronic pain, infertility, political strife, grief, and death—that in different hands might have gone awry. Consider, for instance, these stunning lines from "The Vulture & The Body," after a drive to the fertility clinic on a highway fairly paved with dead animals—deer, racoon, coyote—and a visit with an oddly faceless "quicksilver" doctor:

Some days there is a violent sister inside of me, and a red ladder        that wants to go elsewhere,

I drive home on the other side of the road, going south now.The white coat has said I'm ready, and I watch as a vulture        crosses over me, heading toward

the carcasses I haven't properly mourned or even forgiven,        What if, instead of carrying

   a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

There's a lot to say about this poem, and about these particular lines: there's the genesis of the book's title, for one, the balanced arrangement of images, the control of line and syntax, that enigmatic "forgiven," but even so I was most taken with that "violent sister" and her "elsewhere:" Who is this semblable, ma soeur? Shadow twin to the voice that wants to mourn the roadkill? A weird double like the dandelions that "reproduce asexually, / making perfect identical selves, bam, another me" in "Dandelion Insomnia"? Eerie dualities and uneasy pairings largely inform this book, and give it much of its shape and pattern: the living and the dead, fire and water, creation and destruction—all more compelling because Limón treats them not so much as opposites but as distinct realities held (or carried?) together, like the "dead branch breaking but not breaking," or the "loud silence" in "Late Summer after a Panic Attack." It's worth keeping in mind that a quote from Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses" introduces the collection: "She had some horses she loved / She had some horses she hated. // They were the same horses."

In the marvelous "Notes on the Below," dedicated to Mammoth Cave National Park, the two states considered here are light and dark:

All my life, I've lived above the ground,        car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,and still I've not understood the reel of this life's purpose.

Later, the speaker appeals to the dark, the "400 miles of interlocking caves" for understanding:

        Ruler of the Underlying, let mespeak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speakto the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed bat,

to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core        that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what'sshouting, but to what's underneath asking for nothing.

I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.

Like many poems in The Carrying, this one gathers powers it goes. Starting with a largely rhetorical gesture—"Tell me—humongous cavern, wet limestone, sandstone" (like a supplicant addressing the Cumaean Sibyl...