A Review of Camille T. Dungy’s Trophic Cascade, by Porscha Simmons
In all of my years as an avid reader, very few books have earned the prominent position of being by my bedside after I finished reading it. Those books include In Search of My Mother’s Gardens, by Alice Walker, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, and not many others. Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy has joined that elite.
Dungy shapes words and concepts in this work of poetry that beg and demand for a second, third, and fourth read, giving glimpses of new ideas and stirring new feelings new layers of familiarity each time.
Trophic Cascade starts with the poem “Natural History,” which I admit was too ‘big’ for me, initially. This poem beckoned me back, especially as I read this book during my own move from a major Metropolitan area back South to a more rural area where I have ancestral roots.
“Before the fetus proves viable, a stroll creekside in the High Sierra” is the second offering in the collection, a shorter piece than “Natural History,” but quite possibly the one that summarizes and balances the entire collection on it’s back.
Opening with the lines:
“It seems everyone is silvered , dead, until we learn to see the living —”
This entire poem does a great deal of heavy lifting, but these two opening lines tie this poem and the entire book firmly into being a collection about “birth, death, and ecosystems of power” as the book jacket so deftly describes this book.
The title poem of the book Trophic Cascade talks about the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, but also tells the story of reinvention and finding yourself, specifically after motherhood. Dungy ties together our shared ecosystems with our internal struggles and journeys and life experiences in a way that opens new worlds of self knowledge and implores to reader to be gentle with themselves and the whole world.
A great many of the poems in Trophic Cascade are written from the perspective of a new mother, and within that, we as readers are invited to consider life anew. In subsequent poems, Dungy focuses on events like baby’s first birthday or the question of if she is sleeping through the night with phenomenon of plants and animals at different stages of development. These comparisons and contrasts never feel forced which is the magic of how this collection unfolds, showing us connections that we knew but never quite saw and demanding us to use these new eyes to see with.
Porscha L. Simmons is a freelance writer and creativity consultant.
An Ecosystem of Interwoven Wonder was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.