What Is the Difference Between a Dream Sequence and Something Microscopic?: A Review of Molly Kugel’s GROUNDCOVER

photo by the reviewer

I have just finished preparing my garden beds for the winter—clearing the bindweed, taking down the tomato weave, adding worm castings and bonemeal to the soil. I am surprised to find some lingering sprigs of cilantro and dill which I clip and take with me inside. I started gardening like a lot of people, at the beginning of the pandemic, and found myself researching seed varieties, growing regions, and OMRI-approved solutions for aphids with an almost obsessive fervor. What I like is the unique needs of each plant—their sensitivities and adaptive functions—the way that they are much like people in their individual proclivities and desires for food, comfort, and warmth in varying levels. It gives to me a new understanding of what it means to be a steward of the environment.

This is the very thing that struck me afresh in Molly Kugel’s new collection, Groundcover. Constructed in four parts, this collection moves through the seasons, each part giving careful attention to that which grows around us, the history, or her-story, and the seasonality of our own lives. A gentle speaker arises from the collection, one who has been through hardship and yet still holds the world in tender awe. A voice that is here to make us see the environment with the same compassion we hold for loved ones.

It is also a voice that is giving credit where credit is due—throughout the collection, she invokes female botanists, naturalists, and environmentalists that have fallen into some degree of obscurity. In the poem “Anna Atkins,” an apostrophe poem for the late algologist and photographer, Kugel writes of her work with algae:

the way the tendrils swayed and etched themselves
into unique bodies of tangled time that remembered

and forgot at once and knew who’d gone before
and who would follow, welcoming your bone hands…”

 The language folds in on itself and undulates like algae moving, but also time. The poem is referring to the etching of the calotype photography process, but also the way history is a “unique body of tangled time” which forgets and remembers as we plunge our hands into it, and bring our attention to it.

And Kugel would like to bring attention to these women and their achievements, especially during our current environmental crisis as we collectively look over the IPCC report and shake our heads in disbelief. Among the many women referenced in the collection is Rachel Carson, whose books brought national attention to the impact of pesticides. Because of Carson’s lyric voice, her work was often dismissed in sexist accusations of mysticism instead of science. In the epigraph for “Incantations” Kugel quotes Robert  Metcalf, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of California-Riverside, as saying of Carson’s book, Silent Spring, “[Are we] going to progress logically and scientifically upward or are we going to drift back to the dark ages where witchcraft and witches rain?” This is perhaps because Carson’s work, as Kugel writes, “tunnels to what isn’t here,  / but is here,” bringing attention to the devastating impact of what is not overtly understood.

What Kugel notices in Carson’s work is something she has clearly incorporated into her own writing. This ability to tunnel-in or zoom-in to the microscopic understanding of something and make it a world unto itself, is what makes this collection so haunting. Kugel pays particular attention to the taxonomy and epithets that accompany plant names that reveal an almost anthropomorphic understanding of the way a plant moves and grows. In the poem “Forsythia” Kugel describes forsythia suspensa, the yellowing shrub whose branches drape in a weeping fashion, “the lemon drops / of lament, the sting of beauty.” Out of this description, the speaker’s grief becomes present, “…mid-air the arms could reach everywhere / the roots no longer resting in a fixed point, / deep into soil, but alit with this hour and the past…” Like memory, the poem opens from what we thought was a fixed study into a past grief that indirectly haunts the present of the poem.

This cellular-level attention brings us into many moments of liminality, probing at phenomena that are both here and not here to expand on what it means to grieve over an extended period of time. In the poem “Diatoms” Kugel asks, “What is the difference between a dream sequence / and something microscopic?” as she tries to articulate  realities that straddle in-between spaces unseen by the naked eye. Diatoms are plankton with transparent cell walls, often referred to as glass houses, that make up almost half the organic matter in our oceans. And what better way to bring attention to the enormity of what we don’t actually know about existence, or what becomes of us after we die? Of diatoms, Kugel writes:

We don’t need to know everything in this earthen place
I would like to imagine that your glass
houses reside with souls of those presumed
unreachable, gone from the world, as though
if we used our readers, focused a bit harder
in the dying light, then we can see their faces again.

 We are left to think of the faces of departed loved ones drifting in our waterways in imperceptible, tiny glass houses, with us, but simply out of reach from our oafish eyes.

I would be remiss if I did not directly speak to the heart-wrenching loss that permeates the collection. The reader becomes aware of the death of an older brother, lost at an impossibly young age, in the poignant pantoum, “Boy, Age 7” which begins, “When my brother swam past the buoy, / my mother raced barefooted toward the ocean.” A loss that seems always present with the speaker and her family, appearing again in the poem “Mid-century Modern Sofa”:

 ...it now seemed to see all the things

our older brother never could,
gone too soon to ever leave our mother’s house;
he lay on the woolen cushions all day

in his last months…

 The speaker (and her family) carry the sofa from one location to the next across the country, as one carries sense memories of the deceased, imprinted with the pain of what never could be.

What I can’t help but think of as I read these poems is how they feel like transmissions to another plane of existence or another time.  How they take us through that conveyance into some glimpse of the other side. In “Transmissions” Kugel writes, “as though by echoing into the silver microphone /our goodbyes could go traveling an unimaginable distance, / sound waves flowing through the currents of a river…” These poems take us down that river, and deep into the soil of the rich earth around us, and show us how that grief becomes the source of stewardship, for memory and the earth around us. In many ways, tending to the earth is also tending to memory. I know when I go back out to my garden in the spring to plant seeds or search for cotyledon leaves, I will be thinking of the microscopic world around me, and perhaps those thresholds where I could impart some word or two to those I’ve lost as well.