Fiercely against the world’s fire
In the Key of Decay, Em Dial. Palimpsest Press, 2024.
It’s rare for a book of poems in the 2020s to skirt discussion of the Anthropocene. The human impact on the natural environment, engineered to further human existence, is psychologically invasive — every action feels born of lack of imagination to adapt in a manner that is optimal to long-term survival. Em Dial’s In the Key of Decay is a necropastoral exploration of this failure — failed scientific research, entrenched racism based on binary “norms,” and climate change, to name but three areas explored. Although these poems lay out a disappointing litany of human folly, Dial’s is not a resigned voice. Rather there is a fierceness to Dial’s diction, a desire for survival by adaptation, and a determination to find new beauty in the world or, perhaps, a world that moves past the need to define beauty.
The term “necropastoral” was developed by Joyelle McSweeney to describe a political-aesthetic existence in which human impact on nature can no longer be separated from the experience of nature, which has been poisoned and mutated as a result of coexistence with humanity. The rise of superbugs and increasingly less easily treatable diseases is just one example of the effect of this further human meddling. Dial’s opening poem, “Necropastoral in the Key of Decay” sets the scene for the remainder of the collection and, in six quatrains, captures what it means to live in such a world:
Some memories blur across the amygdala. I think once
I was young and learning to ride a bike and ran over
a squirrel and I pinched my brakes and looked back
and it reballooned out of its body to continue running.
I am sometimes an arbiter of death. I wear the role
like a season . . . (11)
The line break between “I think once / I was young and learning” is startling and implies it’s difficult to imagine being something other than this arbiter of death. To me, it also suggests learning how to play the role of death is what it means to mature as a person today. The long lines of this introductory poem give it the feel of a tale told in the silence of a dark night. The images Dial conjures are rich, particularly in the concluding stanza:
And sure, it is possible that the earth is just accumulating grief.
That the permafrost is melting from the mantle’s vibrating sorrow.
It might explain why I keep picturing my hands plunging into the
soil for my cousins’ and coming up with fingers tangled in thread (11)
These delicate lines capture both the physical destruction of the earth and, at the same time, the anxiety felt by so many people about this destruction. The tangle of threads suggest the lostness that can envelope one even when trying to reach for connection unrelated to the climate emergency.
The poet knows how to ratchet up the intensity of the horror they are writing about. They use the page effectively to shatter lines as necessary. For instance, “Lost in the World” reflects upon an uncle’s house burning down in a California forest fire, which seems prescient as wildfires are decimating the state as I write this. Consider:
When I say fuck 12, I mean
12 as in PG&E, as in instruments
of destruction in the shape
of presidents. Sometimes the words slip
out of me like a landslide politics of consent
politics of pleasure necropolitical
climate apocalypse they all sit
in a pile like clothes on the chair.
An oil spill of death leaking dew
drops on the floor (14)
This stanza is deceptive. The opening few lines are declaratively angry, but the words that slip out after that — “politics of consent,” “politics of pleasure” — expand the implications of the poem to show how blame might be apportioned or conceived. The way the lines are broken suggest the convulsiveness of an anger that can’t be settled into an easy coherence. The words here sit like a pile of clothes on a chair, and it’s hard not to picture that chair surrounded by flames. At the end of the passage, jamming “an oil spill of death” with “leaking dew” on the same line hints at the beauty of this failure, dew drops being something of a romantically idyllic image.
The poem “In lieu of pronouns, I’d like to say” captures Dial’s wit and determination. After two poems dealing in human failure on such a large scale, Dial asks, “Can’t we be past this now?”:
before tanks shoved clock faces upon the shores
of the world, there were as many understandings
of seasons as there are ways a leaf can disconnect
from that which made it
all of this to say: Hi, I use nowinter/babypear
pitsweat/longdays and amaranthspine/compostheap
chlorine/ribs-on-the-grill/blacktop mirage (16)
As this passage demonstrates, Dial has no time for the binary and the trappings of personhood designed to confine and control (particularly concepts of beauty). Many other poems in the collection explore this topic in great depth but this poem captures in metaphor the very root of these judgments. The image of clock faces being shoved up a beach by tanks is one that will stay with me for a long time. The lightness and humour of “nowinter/babypear” and the other imagined pronouns are rich and arresting and wonderfully questioning of those who feel the need to police personal definition.
The second-to-last stanza might serve as the guiding spirit of the collection — a stalwart statement of engagement in the now:
if presence and absence are binary, I could die right now
joyously to have been grown in a love that took the a,
a synonym for present, for here, and existent, clipped it
from endanger, remixed the word under my skin until
I engendered myself a form not yet formed (16)
Aurally, this is powerful work — “binary” and “joyously” create an internal rhyme that bounces through the first two lines until the “a” at the end of the second line, which stutters again on line three against “synonym.” “Present, for here, and existent” is another musical phrase that is continued in “clipped it,” “remixed,” and “skin until.” “Endanger” breaks the line with the stutter of its “a” once again, but the sound resolves itself aurally and visually in “engendered” on the final line.
Though these are only three examples, ultimately Dial’s poems invite the reader to recalibrate their way of seeing themselves in the world. Certainly metaphor encourages this, but Dial’s direct manner of engaging with their topic makes it feel a more urgent and compelling engagement. The concluding crown of sonnets, “Against Beauty,” for instance, deserves an essay of its own for this reason. Dial’s control of language throughout the book makes the necropastoral no less daunting to face, but it demonstrates that poetry can be a fierce companion in any situation.
— Robert Colman is a poet, essayist and critic based in Newmarket, ON, whose most recent book of poems is Ghost Work (Palimpest Press 2024).
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