Green Island

The title poem of Liz Countryman’s Green Island evokes a seaside scene with the speaker’s father and, after dizzying shifts between time, space, and scale, ends:

inside the suitcase on the closet’s high shelf are a few particles of sand and on my father’s soft blue Green Island t shirt
is a velvety white sun, a boat and capital letters
as he sits on a lawn chair in the evening in our backyard 

Anchored in family, place, and a postmodern sensibility of destabilized meaning, Countryman’s vertiginous poems are held together rhythmically:

When my trees were knocked down it was a development.
When my ribs knocked, trees grew among them.
I grew a forest in me to thrash against, thanks
to beautiful people’s disregard in drab rooms,
next to sliding glass doors—forests of hands briefly circling me in dance.
My own body? It was a plane.

These lucid, wry poems delight in the situational comedy of motherhood (“I am a repository / of your head smell”). Countryman shows how the work of mothering and of belonging to earth are co-constitutive, each demanding both radical self-decentering and radical care: “I’m teaching you to use toilet paper. / It was ripped from the Great Northern Forest.” 
For Countryman, even family relationships are epistemic: “By giving each of my daughters a sibling, I also give them / some other region they’re next to but can’t know,” she writes, and, “As we face the book, I feel so adjacent to you.” A book of field poetics evoking proximal learning and deep ecology, Green Island stages motherhood, memory, and mind as overlapping forces of situated, embodied consciousness:

It is the motion I make when leaving you in your car seat, facing 
backwards.
How your warm organs in my embrace withhold the undiscovered place 
they/constitute.

“The Clearing,” an 11-page poem, opens with an image of deforestation: “Birds, we’ve cleared away your space.” Parlaying self and place as shared intimacies, the speaker arrives at true seeing: “In my memory, I never looked into the woods. The clearing was / hospitable and strange. It had been there a long time. / I was new.”