The title of Dorianne Laux’s Life on Earth, like the collection itself, is an astute hybrid of imagination and science, myth and reason. On the one hand, it evokes our existential isolation, on the other a subtle echo of our search for life on other planets. Laux’s lenses, however, see into yet unperceived life within our subtle relationships with products, inventions, and pop culture, as well as the flexible boundaries we share with myth, poetry, and the unwitnessed, unexperienced aspects of our own lives and souls.
The title poem opens upon the fact of our stranger than fiction existence: “The odds are we should never have been born. / Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be / exact.” The poem carries us from this genesis on an evocative swing through subsequent miracles of human life, arriving at a reverence for each life of the audience that earns its emotional appeal through a scientific tracing of what barely seems possible:
When you think you might be
through with this body and soul, look down
at an anthill or up at the stars, remember
your gambler chances, the bounty
of good luck you were born for.
In contrast, the two breaks on “be” in the opening and ending, an infinitive and a subjunctive, highlight two ways of being stuck in the mind, one conceptually detached, the other mired in uncertainty. The poem’s intentional play among thoughts addresses a reader who may be trapped in them against their will, questioning that existence merely “might be” and despairing. The paradoxically fact-based assertion of grace in response is indicative of the larger collection, in which poems explore various modes of symbiotic interchange between the rational and imaginative aspects of mind, often returning from new vantages bearing the quiet inspiration that there is nothing more wildly fantastic than the actual psyche experiencing actual life.
The title poem treats our collective and individual lives interdependently, and the permeable membrane between them is often traversed in this collection by shared aspects such as inherited myths and modern products and settings. For example, “Waitress” arrives at an individual perspective on the uniqueness of each life through an odd-job narrative: “This is the grand phenomenon of my body. This thirst / is mine. This is my one and only life.” On the other hand, “Winter Brother” recalls a creative engagement with a constellation that helped to intuit a broader context for mourning. The adding of lines to the inherited constellation begins the process, forming a personal version of Orion:
From hunter to archer, just like that.
And why not? Whoever made him up
is lost to history’s shimmering distance,
and I’m here now in my dark backyard,
a splash of ghost-sibling lilies
glowing at my feet. I like to think
he’s my older brother
who died far from home
on a lonely road, his broken body
found in a muddy gutter
swollen with rain. That’s how it is
down here on the death-packed earth
where nothing is eternal, the bodies
buried haunch to haunch
beneath indifferent dirt.
The earthly facts of death coexist with celestialized imagination, neither one denying the other. Imagination opens creative space to the psychological truth that the brother lives on in the speaker’s consciousness. The line break between “to think” and the constellated memory underscores the balance between the psychic presence of imagination and the rational awareness that contextualizes it in the poem. The cooperation of these nondual aspects of mind allows a deeper witnessing of the past self and makes it possible to share with the reader the dialogue of feeling and intuition in the original constellation-making process:
When he died
I felt alone, some part of me
went cold, some echo
following me like a false star,
so I lifted my brother
into the sky where I could ride
on his belt as he strode over
the seven continents, sharing
an eyedropper of water between us.
The concluding image tethers this psychically reinvested constellation, through material tears, to the other experiences of mourning on Earth. We are able to see, retrospectively, how the intuitive remaking of the constellation integrated the experience of loss with an imaginal companion for the next steps into ongoing life. The poem, in turn, offers this flexible process to the reader by sharing its intuitive and subjective aspects in ways that concurrently dignify and psychologically contextualize.
Other poems use productions of contemporary culture as windows into the psyche. “Bedtime Stories” provides a lighter treatment of the ways that “implausible and vaguely / probable” alien shows on TV reintroduce us to ourselves:
I doze off in the TV’s
cathode beam, its glimmer and glint,
its gleam and flare as I fall up into space
made of nothing but light and time, formless
and flailing, an alien to my waking life.
Due to willingness to perceive her own life through “alien” perspectives, the speaker sees past literalized fantasies to appreciate their psychological roots. The gentle deconstruction invites us to look further into other mass fantasies whose outer spaces may also provide more insight to the interiority.
“Joy” performs a similar movement; however, it sees through a perspective formed from worrying about the future, “[e]ven when the gods have driven you / from your home, your friends,” to an imaginatively retrospective posture framed by a grounding practice in the present:
As you would accept
air into your lungs, without
thinking, not counting
each breath. As you accepted
the earth the first time you stood
up on it and it held you, how it was
just there, a solid miracle,
gravity something you would
learn about only later
and still be amazed.
The leap to acceptance imagines that we will look back at the present through a perspective focused on necessary life and learning that has shaped such a perspective, a practicable way to observe that for which we might otherwise fail to experience gratitude.
Approaching daily life from such an outlook would, of course, mitigate some anxieties, opening us that much more to the day at hand. Its imaginative embrace of life is only deepened by other poems’ confrontations with existential ground. Dedicated to the late Tony Hoagland, whose work lives on amongst the ancestry of poets who appear in it, “Mugged by Poetry” chronicles an ecstatic reading romp on which beloved poems are discovered and rediscovered in joyful, temporarily self-transcendent abandon:
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it
that we can’t grind a lens big enough to see. I light up
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me,
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding
the iced trees. What, I ask you, will become of me?
The paradoxical final questioning of the lyric space — or reader — stems unexpectedly from the joy of being alone with the unperceivable expanse of the universe evoked in the readings. The emphasis on the eye’s limitations, even with our ingenious lenses, opens to deeper wonder at the mind’s deeper perceptiveness. The break on “light up” evokes the reciprocal illumination that has taken place in this night’s iteration of reading, the reader offering living attention and reception of the poems’ attention to life, as if the poems’ light is experienced and reflected as an inner light by the moon-like reader. The synesthesia of listening to the “moon scalding / the iced trees” further underscores the psychic interplay. The inner world, which paradoxically includes all of us readers out here, is so endless, unqualifiable, mysterious, and beloved that we couldn’t imagine our individual experience of it ending, even when facing a page implying that it will outlive its author.
Both the connective joy and the final interrogative evoke the psychological relationship between the reading poet and the poet’s unquantifiable reader within, cultivated by years of deepening one’s own reading practice and inner library. These subtle relationships infuse poems like “How to Sleep,” which are more overtly existential. Its imperatives to the reader, though, almost sound like answers to that question about the prior speaker’s ultimate fate:
Let your mountainous forehead
with its veins of bright ore
ease down, let the deep lines
between your brows flatten,
unruffle the small muscles
below your temples
The poem walks the reader through a gradual relaxing of the body, its repetition and right branching sentences miming the lull like a syntactical massage — even approaching and incorporating the sorts of intrusive thoughts that sometimes disrupt our rest:
Die into
the pillow, calm in the knowledge
that you will someday cease, soon
or late, later or soon, the song
you’re made of will stop, your body
played out
The form of the sentence is similar here, but tense breaks like the one after “soon” complicate the evocation of eventuality as a peaceful thought. For a moment, the title really seems like a bit of false advertising; indeed, we’re now far more compelled to read on than close our eyes:
Lay your head down and relax
into it: death. Accept it.
Trick yourself like this.
Hover in a veil of ethers.
Call it sleep.
The ending lines enact a division of the reader from the other part of themselves they are instructed to lull to sleep in order to perform the helpful “Trick.” This is further complicated by the speaker continuing to give instructions to “Hover” and then “Call it sleep” when it has been reiterated that we are talking about far more. The reader is asked to create a caring yet aware relationship with themselves in order to rest in the sharing of existential uncertainty, an act of faith with no fantastic promises, only those that result from the practice itself. The final injunction is doubly wise in these regards: It discloses its instructive sleight of hand, offering the kind of trust that might actually help one sleep — but also moves through the surface association between sleep and death to offer a bond of deeper understanding across the dread and isolation that threaten the lives we yet live.
In order to sleep we must first awaken to the deep sense of mystery, complexity, and felt connection with others and the world in and around us that makes us conscious. “Blossom” indicates the healing and self-healing that can take place when personal and objective knowledge of psyche collaborate:
A wound is a fire
sinking into itself. The tinder serves
only so long, the log holds on
and still it gives up, collapses
The imagistic rendering of the body’s natural reconstitution around a wound urges a conscious witnessing of a process it is easy to take for granted. This focus becomes more compelling when we consider how our perception of life transforms if we interpret wounds as opportunities to witness the body’s own innate healing potential. Returning to the previous metaphorical link between fire and consciousness, the poem seems to indicate a reciprocally restorative effect for the psyche. Corresponding with the resilient acceptance of mortal completion in “How to Sleep,” this poem is telling a truth about the completion of a wound’s temporary existence within a human life. Each returns its energy to an ongoing consciousness, like a poem to a reader:
Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands
with the unknown, what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future, naked
and small, sewn back together
scar by scar.
Recalling the discussions of interrogative and imperative communication with the reader, we might consider these lines as both direct and self-reflexive address, the reader an interactive presence within the poet as well as a human with their own trials to hold and release. The mystery of the poem centers in the concurrent awakening to life itself and to ourselves as consciousness made, in part, of what we learn from our healings—a center that can be found in many places, poems among them.
Such inner dialogue is not a panacea, but a practice of ongoing dedication to making poetry and consciousness in all of their interwoven aspects. Long ago, in fragments perhaps recalled in these poems, Heraclitus wrote that fire rests by changing; amidst these recurrences, we pick up Life on Earth and our quick eyes engage with its realizations of psyche in poetic form, perhaps to be “returned to our future” as well.
[Published by W. W. Norton on January 9, 2024, 144 pages, $26.99 US hardcover]