Contemporary Poetry

164 contemporary poetry

endangered waterbird species’ (p. 66 ). Spahr attempts to incorpo-
rate topical knowledge into a shape that forms connections with
individuals. Working entropologically, transformation and decay
become central to the poem’s form as facts, once posed, unravel
and are repelled by personal meditations. The movement of air in
the fi rst poem is replaced by fi re in the second:

When I wake up this morning the world is a series of isolated,

burning fi res as it is every morning.

It burns in Israel where ten died from a bomb on a bus.

Yesterday it also burned in the Philippines where twenty-one

died from a bomb at the airport. And then it burned some

more a few hours later outside a health clinic in a nearby

city, killing one.

It burns and the pope urges everyone to fast and pray for

peace because it is Ash Wednesday. (p. 56 )

This is a poet’s desperate attempt to understand the intercon-
nection between wars and her country’s involvement in Iraq, as
well as the religious rituals that are created to enable a decoding
of the threat to individuals. Commenting on Spahr’s more recent
memoir examining climate change, The Transformation ( 2007 ),
Eric Keenaghan proposes that her poetry:

[e]xhibits a nostalgia for some acceptable way to talk about

identity and community. Spahr reveals the problem of defi n-

ing who ‘they’ are as ubiquitous in this age of Homeland

Security. ‘So it was a time of troubled and pressured pro-

nouns’.^72

In this connection of everyone with lungs, Spahr is not only looking
for connections which bind communities together, but also to
show how the machinery of war appropriates the environment.
Her speaker demonstrates how Hawaii’s status as a military base
redefi nes the ecology of the island: