Sarah Giragosian entwines mourning for her mother with grief for the natural world throughout her stunning new collection, Mother Octopus (Halcyon Books, 2024). Though the book also contains lovely love poems and fierce anti-racist and anti-patriarchal poems, the through line is grief. Many of the strongest poems identify with various animals, particularly birds and sea creatures, as well as minerals and the very earth. The collection carries a deep awareness of geologic time and weaves everything together, expressing “the merciless grace /of that web” in which we live.
Section I, “In the World of Sham and Nought,” confronts the end of nature bluntly, as in the title poem of the section, which mourns our destruction of animals. One of many fine bird poems, “Snowy Owl Nocturne,” begins: “The earth is burning, the glaciers are calving, / but for now at least (though all is melting) I’m an echo // of snow, a belonging.” The owl, like the speaker, can read “the book of night,” ending with the wonderful image: “my forehead pressed like a satellite against the abyss.” Giragosian is well-versed in negative capability, as Keats described it: the ability to enter into the sparrow pecking outside the window. Giragosian has worked at a raptor rehabilitation center and knows her birds.
In “Breaking through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,” the speaker asks, “but how to tell this story? / How to stake out lyrical territories / for nuclear fallout?” Somehow, this poet manages to do so brilliantly. In “Open Country, Open Road,” the speaker says, “call me the nagging reminder of carbon emissions, / the kid-in-the-back who won’t shut up,” who will “remind us that even the wild, / full of ears, is half-invented thing.” This section also seethes with rage at American empire, its predations and racist foundation, as pointedly expressed in the poems such as “Field Guide for the White Naturalist” and “First Cousins.”
Giragosian is acutely attuned throughout to the linked processes of birth and death, both contained in the figure of the title poem, “Mother Octopus”: octopuses generally die after giving birth, though recent experiments (removing the optic or pituitary gland) have shown this not to be necessary, as the poem describes; the speaker keenly wishes this could be true for her own departed mother: “all this to say you never had to lose // yourself for me.” However, mothering is entwined with dying throughout this wide-ranging volume, as birth and death are revealed as two sides of one leaf.
The first section ends with a gorgeous short poem, “Aphasia of Butterflies,” which describes “the terror of a butterfly” after she “shapeshifts. / What is she doing with wings?” Giragosian enables one to feel what it might be like to be suddenly transformed and emerge as a butterfly: “She flies and is lucid as a jolt. / What does she have if not discovery, two weeks / or less, and all her brilliant defenses gone?” The natural creature is itself, but perhaps also a figure for the poet, who also consoles herself “in the hour of the brutal present” with “discovery” in the face of mortality. And with wings.
Section II, “Salt Lick,” concerns both love—for wife and mother—and rage against male predation. “Salt Lick” is a striking love poem: “You’re my salt lick,” it opens, and toward the end proclaims, “we’re the exchanges between wind, / sea, and air.”A series of prose poems on love and language focuses on the letter L. A series of haibun runs throughout, showcasing the poet’s knowledge of geology; she has written an excellent essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s use of geologic time in “The Mountain.” Bishop is a clear foremother to this collection in its scrupulous use of language and imagery.
In “Hunger,” for example, a wounded peregrine falcon, “jilted bride / of twilight,” experiences “that terror of being with yourself, / grounded.” The image applies to bird was well as speaker; the poem closes, “and still the elemental singing / (the counterforce of prison) / in your bones for sky.” The final image recalls the end of “What Are Years” by Marianne Moore, another foremother. In “Self-Portrait as Barred Owl,” Giragosian again projects her grief through the figure of a raptor. The poem opens with a devastating image:
When you stopped breathing,
I pushed off the dock
of my life and left all the goods
for the crows.
Later, she writes, “My thoughts: switchblades.” The speaker as owl sees, in the end, that “Grief is a vigil of earth and atmosphere.” The poem is reminiscent of Helen MacDonald H is for Hawk, in its tremendous use of a raptor as the objective correlative for the wildness of grief.
There is violence in many of these poems, whether animal, human, or both. For example, “Missing Person” describes the chilling experience of being stalked. The speaker declares, “I said teach me // to be a blade. And I’ll teach you / about being female.” Near the end of the poem, the speaker repeats, “Let me tell you about being female, / about the rage pent up in a folded blade.” “Promenade à Deux” uses the deadly courtship of scorpions to depict the speaker’s wounds at the hands of men, wounds marked “in the geographies of my body.” In “Whale Fall,” the speaker declares, “This is how I’d like to go: / as a landscape cracked open.” Here death leads to more life: a dead whale nourishes underwater life for decades. Later in this section, underwater imagery is used again, this time for the speaker’s own dangerousness: in “Don’t Be Fooled,” she learns from poisonous jellyfish how to defend herself, and in the next poem, a deadly starfish called “Destroyer of Worlds.” Like Dickinson, she experiences her own desire as potentially lethal, here “a plague of need,” “a terror of absorption.” The final poem of this section, “Diet and Feeding Behavior of the Hagfish, Practicing Witch of the Sea,” is perhaps most horrifying, as the hagfish enters wounded creatures and “feasts from inside out”; here, though, the speaker mercifully)imagines herself not as hagfish but as the invaded creature who will “have to play dead” as her “counterattack.” This is nature not prettified but full of bizarreness and predation, as well as terrible beauty.
Section III, “Foreign Bodies,” returns to death and grief, as well as love. In “Gift of Ammonite,” the ancient fossil “dizzies my mind back / to an ancient seabed . . . an excursion into earth’s memory.” Here, “you can hear evolution’s queer refrains,” as the poem reveals itself as a love poem, the poet having waited through eons “for her love to arrive.” Another poem, “Phonic for Grief,” uses owl imagery again: “When my mother died, an owl came to teach me / the language of the night.” The speaker imagines, “I carry my mother on my back, / a spider ferrying her hatchlings around town” … “though my tragedy’s ordinary”. And in “Self-Portrait as Tomb Raider,” the speaker imagines herself endlessly seeking her mother: “I can’t keep away. I’ll be a thief // of death for you,” “to steal you back / from eternity; what’s left to lose now?” The poem is reminiscent of Gilgamesh, in the rich grave offerings like those Gilgamesh gives to his beloved Enkidu, the wildness of grief, and the unceasing search for a nonexistent solution to the death of the beloved.
In “Fowl at Large,” an ars poetica, the “dreaming poem” is compared to “the accidental bird”; the speaker concludes, “My thirst is deeper; / it shrieks for that kite slicing through unseen // geographies, lost, windstorm-dazed, / her compass needle wild as a roulette wheel.” That wildness is evinced in many of the poems here, such as “The Release,” in which the speaker describes the shaky release of a rehabbed young red tail hawk, in all its uncertainty and danger, and “Nature’s deus ex machine in the form / of a mature red tail hawk / (her mother?) exploding from the tree- / tops to defend her,” in a climax that raises goosebumps.
The final poem, “Love Song of the Fig Wasp,” describes a lesser known metamorphosis: the fig wasp pollinates the fig (which is revealed to be not a fruit, but a flower inside-out) by crawling inside, losing wings and antennae in the process, to lay her eggs and die, echoing the image of “Mother Octopus.” The poem, and book, ends: “Yes … slice it open. You won’t find their secrets. / The juice will spill open your lips.” Like Dickinson, Giragosian is adept at using natural imagery to express a queer poetics. “Love Song of the Fig Wasp” makes an astonishing partner to “Aphasia of Butterflies,” which ends the first section: two paradoxically opposed metamorphoses—the gaining and losing of wings—are portrayed as equally terrifying, in a pair of dazzling poems.
Near the end, “Metaphor as (De-)Composition” again considers grief, in a cascade of interlinking natural metaphors, ending with “bacteria and viruses / feasting and butterfly kissing and killing, / all cross-stitched together somehow,” so that “by the merciless grace / of that web I pass on.” This is a profound vision of the interrelationship of all life, and death. In the penultimate poem, “To the Source,” the speaker observes, “It’s getting late and the garden’s flooded,” before asking, “What if all’s related?” As, of course, we know it is . . . and as this collection demonstrates so well.
