A History of the Theories of Rain

In A History of the Theories of Rain, four long poems progressively give shape to the anxieties that come with living on a planet that is on the verge of profound environmental change. Stephen Collis opens this work with “Future Imperfect,” a poem that considers the epochal shift ushered in with climate change, as it wrestles with the question of whether or not we are past the point of no return. Though the term Anthropocene never appears, the confrontation with a new era defined by human destruction informs every page of this book. While contemplating an apocalyptic future, the poet also keeps an eye on the dramatic thresholds of past and present, in sequences that invoke the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice fleeing Hades and images of the seashore precipices of Collis’s native British Columbia.

To introduce the book’s central themes, Collis employs a style that most closely approximates logic: “Even if p is a restabilized climate and q is runaway warming. A time series in which there are alternate possible immediate futures but only one ultimate future is what I fear. Or long for / I don’t know.” In the subsequent two poems he pivots from such constructions and a somewhat polemical stance into more introspective, lyric reflections on self and nature, and how the two intersect:

that which is supposed
to exceed the self
reaches out
into the collective
has its demise too
body counts / bravery
beauty / wing / flame.

The final, title poem offers sweeping surveys of geologic time and a bevy of fascinating scientific facts―“a bee can dodge droplets like its flight is through the matrix”―before closing with quiet meditations on rain. Taken together, these poems are as much an account of how we humans are grappling with a terrifying environmental predicament―dread, frustration, scientific understanding, and personal reflection―as they are odes to Earth itself.