Rachel White’s poems are strongest when she takes on the role of activist, so it’s appropriate that her chapbook, The Velvet Earth After Rain, begins with a formal sonnet dedicated to Edward Abbey, patron saint of anti-social nature lovers and environmental activists. She has said of her writing, “I make poems to praise the living earth, and question the social relations destroying it.”

In her praise poems, various birds and animals flit past without much to say for themselves, but Nature gets a voice in “Desert Tortoise Addresses the Washington County Commission About a Highway Proposed Through the Red Cliffs Reserve.” The tortoise, who is appropriately old and stodgy, makes an appeal to shared humanity and the need of all desert species to cope with ongoing drought:

                             Like you, I hope

to live my three score and ten

In prosperity and peace. Here

In shade of silver green mesquite

feathered as a flight of birds

that returns to roost every year,

I wait out the drought, allayed

in sudden flare of petrichor,

ozone and creosote oil,

The velvet earth after rain. 

It is heartening to read in the Acknowledgements that the tortoise poem originally appeared in Red Cliffs’ zine to preserve the Red Cliffs Natural Conservation Area. Poetry has a great deal to contribute to civic dialog, but it’s essential to bring poetry directly to activists instead of hoping that activists will somehow start reading poetry books. Poetry is a way to humanize and cut through alienating bureaucratic language in the kinds of lawsuits and planning documents that activists have to cope with. The introduction to Dark Mountain’s Issue 10 makes a case for the importance of uncivilized poetics: “Poetry matters because it offers an alternative reality—it refuses the logical, reductionist, materialist aspects of industrial culture; aslant, it invites us to feel our way in the dark.” It’s notable that White’s tortoise poem has also appeared in Dark Mountain.

Indeed, White’s publication list is exemplary of community-engaged poetry of place. She has won the Iron Pen poetry prize at the Utah Arts Festival, and contributed to Utah-centric anthologies from Torrey House Press. This chapbook is part of Moon in the Rye Press, which has an agenda to publish “micro-editions of chapbooks, broadsides, and other projects from Utah writers.” One pleasure of reading local authors is encountering poetic reactions to familiar places and the poems in this chapbook are bioregional to Utah. Titles include: “Psalm for Salt Lake City,” “Sego Lily Ode,” “Pa’ga-dit (Utah Lake),” “Mountain Mahogany,” and “Lookout Peak.”

In “Great Basin Ghazal,” human-scale climate change contrasts with deep time climate changes that formed playas between mountain ranges:

People migrate, displaced by human-caused disasters —

some die without a monument to time

Salt pans of pale lakes reflect a blind sun

in the white ghost of water, vaporized time. 

There is even an obligatory ekphrastic nod to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Utah’s official state work of land art, which has probably inspired enough poetry to deserve its own chapbook someday. White encounters Spiral Jetty stranded by historically low Great Salt Lake water levels and finds, as poets activists tend to do, that even in a broken world there is still so much beauty:

Amy Brunvand

Amy Brunvand is an award-winning poet and an associate librarian at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.