The Eco-Poetry of Cecily Park: Seeds of an Uncertain Domesticity

There is something familiar in Cecily Parks’ poetry, but also something powerfully unique. The work is very much in keeping with the newer genre of eco-confessionalism poetry. Eco-poetry has been associated with poet Elise Cowen, and on Google search is summarized as exhibiting a few features and themes and tactics such as: “the blending of the self and the environment, an emphasis on complicity, personal testimony, intertextuality by juxtaposing internal, personal memories with external geographical details, juxtaposing presence and absence, and exploring sights of extraction.”

In “The Seeds,” Park is ever aware of the life cycle of nature and humankind, its need to reproduce and continue. She examines her own personal state of mind and the state of the domestic and natural world round her. I love her sensitivity toward botany, geology, and the earth sciences. Her momentary dispatches of meditative thought, and the overall flow of the book, struck me as if I were reading a personal field guide to her immediate world.

In “Rio Grande,” Park shows an agile eye toward topography: social, natural, semi-urban, and environmental. “Rio Grande” is unpunctuated and flows in ribbon format down the page, typographically reflecting its subject matter of the river and the dry river bed.

                                 After

the Rio

Grande dried

from my

hand its

disappearance accumulated

sadness when

I learned

a ribbon

of stones

would replace

the Rio

Grande threading

through green

ground-puffs of

mourning lovegrass

and cacti

with flowers

l                   like the

beginnings of

wildfire (pp. 45-46)

Part of Park’s gift is her imagistic imagination. Notice how she describes “cacti/ with flowers/ like the/ beginnings of/ wildfire.” This deft suggestion of the red and yellow cacti flowers being like wildfire flames shows her ability for poetic compression and economy.

In her poem “Sunday,” she begins with a vivid description of an almost pastoral domestic scene toward evening:

So this is Sunday evening

under the live oak behind the kitchen

where the Rose of Sharon

spills purple tea onto the grass,

the yellow bells sound yellow alarms

from tall stalks, and the sunflowers peep

over the fence into the street . . . (p. 30)

And later, Park tells us:

. . . We had another tree that had room

for two girls to sit in it, but the winter freeze

killed it. Gone, too,

the neighbor whose name I never learned

who yelled at speeding cars in her front yard

wearing only a long t-shirt and underwear

with her ageless legs for all to see,

especially me, from my kitchen, as I waited then,

as I wait now, for my daughters’ tears

to come the way they do every Sunday evening

because we cut down their climbing tree

and tomorrow is a school day, and they don’t care

about the sky dropping pink and orange curtains

around the neighbor’s, ending an opera

about a house that held a woman’s life

that some tomorrow will scrape down. (pp. 30-31)

Park uses both a light and a dark palette in this poem, with descriptions and scenes that, with equal irony, can swerve from the lyrical details of her flowering environs to the greater tragedies and ironies of human life. She foregrounds the innocence of her young daughters against the background of a “woman’s life” who’s now gone and whose life and lonely legacy will likely be “scraped” down. The reader is surprised by this unexpected use of the verb “to scrape.” Its use disrupts the easy flow and reach of the poem. The verb pushes the poem’s tenor into a more complex context. Does “scrape” not suggest as well the speeding cars’ potential to scrape the sides of parked cars? Does the verb reflect the idiom of “scraping by,” i.e., the idea of a destitute life fraught with economic uncertainty that perhaps the neighbor woman is leading? No man appears beside her in the doorway. And her thoughtlessness of being not fully dressed and outdoors could suggest a certain indifference and impulsive behavior. Maybe she is so used to living by herself that her appearance to others is no longer on her mind. Or it might display an open sexual carelessness.

Comparing the neighbor and her later absence from her house as suggestive of an “opera” of sorts might draw our attention to the frequent plight of single women in operatic stories who have been controlled and then abandoned by men. These suffering heroines exhibit tragic lives over their need for a man to wed them; a man to provide them with social status and trustworthy companionship. This gives Park’s poems a not-so-understated feminist dimension throughout.

 There is so much compressed in this one poem, including its reflection on what it means to be a woman in society. The poet tells us of the tears her daughters have for their “climbing tree,” which has been cut down. They seem to still innocently mourn this loss of a pleasurable youthful interaction with nature. But they can also just as quickly become unhappy over the idea of returning to school on Monday. They must return to the taming social constrictions of the educational system, which will turn them into adult women.

And Park might be struck by feminist parallels between the adult neighbor and her young girls and what they might encounter as they grow up. Park makes note of the woman’s futile attempts to protest the speeding cars, ignored despite her pleas for the drivers to slow down. She’s ignored by a world that will not heed her demands or wishes. And her state of undress hints at the lessons of feminine modesty and the need for gender acceptable behavior that women must learn, still enforced by a sexist society.

In her long serial prose poem “Dispatches From The Alley” (p. 35), Park once again shows her nuanced way of seeding her poems with various notes of sadness, emotional complexity, and words or phrases that resist easy closure. She artfully disturbs her meditations upon nature with a pointed realism, and concedes there will be no easy resolution. This reminds us of the poet’s perception of contemporary life and its uncertain survival.

She writes in the second half of the first dispatch:

. . . Next, a bank of widows’ tears, long-stemmed purple two-pet-

aled flowers buoyed by the long grasses and alley-side bracken. I’m surprised to find stores of purple in the mop and the weeds: purple for the luxury we lace into the mundane, and purple for grief. I pass a wooden fence, some arched rebar,

a cedar, a palm, and a hackberry. Then here comes a breeze, and someone’s wind chimes release a fragment of song that promises neither beginning nor crescendo

nor resolution. (p. 35)

It is with her closing line: “ . . .song that promises neither beginning nor crescendo/ nor resolution. . .,” (p. 35) by which Park disrupts her poem. The wind chimes “release a fragment of song” instead of a whole song. This highlights the world’s feeling of fragmentation and lack of resolution. Nature and human life are out of kilter, offset by disturbances, and perhaps the beautiful lyric harmonics of the chimes are themselves unable to deliver a fully calming and balanced tonal musicality, one Pythagoras had suggested was in the music of the stars and the universe.

In her second dispatch, she writes:

                                                                                         . . .In our bedroom, my husband con-

fessed he’d never liked wind chimes, but he was trying to. He told me his former

love hated wind chimes, and aligning his dislike with hers felt treacherous now

that he was making a home with me. The clattering outside our window went

on, as if whole sets of antique silverware were dropping out of the sky. It was not

pretty. I thought but didn’t say, Okay, you love me. That’s all. (p. 36)

         Here, her relationship to her husband and her domestic situation are aligned with the undercurrent of nature’s severe storm outside. The sublimation of her husband’s hatred for the wind chimes, something he has held from Park or the poet, is suddenly revealed. This confession brings forth a hidden disagreement, an unhappiness, and irritation that he has obviously held back from her. The confession of this secret is matched by the clattering noise of the storm. A certain ugliness and untidiness, a less-than-harmonious set of domestic arrangements, have now become apparent. The neat setting of silverware seems a metaphor for a disturbance in the order of things in the house, and by extension, the poet and her husband’s day-to-day relationship. The “antique silverware” dropping from the sky seems to parallel this dropped revelation of the husband. This long-held keepsake of inner disagreement, this antique of ancient opinion, is tied so closely to his former lover. The revelation hurts the poet more so because the husband seems to expect some forgiveness from her, some understanding of the sacrifice he has made by holding back this confession. He had contained his inner feeling because he had feared his wife would suspect him of treachery. The poet is uncertain how to interpret this idea of “treachery” and wonders what other dislikes he has been hiding, what other interior fears or secrets or opinions he is harboring.

         “The Seeds” contains poems, thoughts, emotions, and conflicts that are forever germinating, forever bearing new and stranger feelings and interpretations. Park’s observations and sensitivity toward her small world hold universal truths about a larger, uncertain world with its looming threat of extinction. But, a few hours trailing by her side is truly a transcendent learning experience, and reading her poems is to read an emotional field guide of troubling sincerities and sobering visions of beauty and fear. I was reminded of Dorothy Wordsworth’s intimate “The Grasmere Journals,” only Park’s journal is very much from a 21st-century perspective: keen observations tempered by the dislocations of a post-industrial, imbalanced domestic habitat. Park is a mother, a scientist, a poet, who reexamines the American homestead, its familial private domain, its flowering yards, and tree-shade lanes, in the midst of a growingly unviable world.