Coming of Age in the Anthropocene

A Review of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter by H.G. Dierdorff

There is a generation of young writers who will be defined by the political and ecological collapses of the 2020s. It is common in workshops or in bars to hear writers wonder, “What are we going to write about all this?” The sense is that whatever is happening will change everything. With her debut collection, H.G. Dierdorff gives us an early indication of what that change might look like. Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a bildungsroman, a poetic coming of age charted as a series of collapses, layered one over the other: the political, the spiritual, the ecological. Over the course of the book, Dierdorff attempts to bring her poetics in line with this collapse—of a kingdom, of a world.

The book’s project is framed in the title, a reference to King Lear. An unsurprising choice, considering the circumstances of composition, but unlike other Lear narratives—which have proliferated in recent years—Dierdorff centers her drama in the body. The titular poem, “Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter,” begins: “Inside my body, the doll house floating / on the coffee table. . . .” The poet’s father appears. He places a doll in one of the rooms. He warns: obey God, stay inside the house, avoid the storm. The doll house becomes the kingdom, the poet a Lear figure. Quickly, the poem turns. The storm becomes literal: “Nearly 85% of wildland fires are human. / Outside, the seconds between light and sound / unravel whether or not God counts them.” We see in this poem, and increasingly as we read on, the book’s animating tension: what does it mean to be both in and out of the house? To be double-minded, aligned as a woman with the elements, yet saturated, choked, even, by the language of the kingdom, of the father?

This is the book’s rage, figured as a formal or aesthetic collapse. The sonnet becomes a cipher for the poet’s inheritance. The sonnets initially are straightforward, all but iambic. Take one of the early poems, titled “The Summer Before My Baptism, We Go Backpacking in Eastern Oregon.” It begins, “My father teaches the good book: / how to hook and land a rainbow trout / in the Wallowas.” We fish with the poet in prelapsarian bliss, a bliss both religious, familial, and ecological: “O, I will never believe / more in love than in my father’s hands / cooking beans over a small blue flame. . . .” The poem concludes: “Inside the tent, we hold his voice / and believe in talking raccoons and walking trees” (14). The formality, even regularity, of this poem is shocking in light of the later poems, which stretch and distort their content nearly beyond understanding. But for the time being, we experience with the poet her enchantment: hierarchies intact, poetics secure. 

But the book is a departure, an unspooling, a shattering. We see a few formal strains early on—a double-sonnet, a sonnet with the final line omitted, sonnets with extra space opened between stanzas, lines, words. But it’s about halfway through the book when we see a fundamental shift in the poems’ timbre. “Wedding in America” portrays a dance, that ultimate celebration of the continuity of the familial unit, that occurs at the same time as the mass shooting in El Paso. It ends in a sort of daze: “I am dancing with my brothers and sisters. / Near a dark shaft of river we are dancing.” The poem’s distance from the massacre calls into question its own existence: why dance at all? And how? 10 pages later, in “The Poet Rethinks Her Profession,” the question is asked outright: “What use / is another iambic line pleasuring the ear / of a single species?” But it is “Cognitive Dissonance” that marks a full departure. It is a poem with three sides, three entities: the poet, her body; the sonnet; a whale, dead, its corpse stuffed with refuse. The central question: “One way to view / a sonnet is as a box or a little room. How much can be / packed inside before the body refuses?” In excruciating detail, we see the whale stuffed with human garbage, a monstrous inversion of the Jonah narrative—the trash now acting as prophet. It forebodes the end of the sonnet’s viability as a form. The poem ends, “I / swallow. I fit each new word inside the form passed / down to me. The whale carries a fetus, the fetus already / decomposed into a language my poems can’t hold.” This is full ecological and aesthetic collapse. We note, too, that the sonnet is centered on the page, every side flush. Only the last line comes up short, halting a loud inch shy of alignment, the poet no longer willing to gratify the expectations of the form.

In the second half of the collection, Dierdorff strains her themes with a series of ever more unorthodox formal decisions. Extended sonnets, sonnets broken into couplets, sonnets with strange and repeating symbols at the beginnings of the lines, visual poems with stanzas spread all over the page, connected by arrows, circular poems, poems with empty space jutting into the text, each piece an experiment in form, collapses that show us the doll house a long way off. We are in the storm.

The obvious way to read the collection, and I think the way Dierdorff would like us to, is as a journey from naïveté to maturity: an aesthetic coming-of-age. The book views itself as a bildungsroman. As a frame, the poet stitches a seven-part lyric essay through the poems. It is titled, “As the West Coast Burns.” Here we see the poet as the arranger, in present tense, looking west to her flaming home. She sits in her room in Virginia. She is working on her MFA. The pandemic rages. Carefully, she constructs her fall: the book. However, there is no third movement. We never return to the shelter, changed by our journey. We arrive at an uneasy end. We’re not quite sure what has been achieved. This uncertainty is quite in tension with the poet’s seemingly certain tone in the book’s notes: “In writing the poems for Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, I’ve begun to conceive of language as a kind of fungal network in a forest through which trees exchange vital nutrients and information.” The poet has had her vision. She gives us a poetics of collapse: voilà. But we’re left to wonder—where are we? Where do we go from here? What will the future hold? All Dierdorff gives us, in a suite of erudite, raging, brave poems, is a hint. 

It will be a howling, a tempest.