The poems in Susan Laughter Meyers’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, winner of the 2012 Cider Press Review Editors Prize, marry clear imagery with an elegiac tone in a meditation on both the innumerable losses involved in life and the wealth each moment still offers. As in “Morning after the Hailstorm,” these poems offer a sense of waking to a wounded world. It is a world in which there is still much beauty, but one in which we must acknowledge that sorrow and loss are part of the abundance that this world gives: For a few early hours the tender pretense (forget the havoc) that the heart is cheerful as birdsong. Till the sun, searing a different truth, climbs higher.
“Sweet Repetition” A Review of Susan Meyers’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass by J onathan B utler
58
Many of the poems focus on plants and animals, beings in which our own fragility is writ small. Through these figures, the poet explores the tensions between the kaleidoscopic abundance of life and the fragility of individual beings. In “Dear Atamasco Lily,” the poem from which the book takes its title, Meyers writes: Nothing else in the swamp rises beyond the surprise of you and your sweet repetition
As Meyers hints here and in other poems, this “sweet repetition” is that of generations. In the case of plants, animals, and people, the starting and end points of individual lives are mapped against this backdrop of species continuity. While Meyers’s poems often regard nature’s creatures sympathetically, they also refuse to anthropomorphize or domesticate them: even the songbirds are foreign, ambassadors of a world that is a source of beauty and joy, but also incomprehensible and cruel. The irony is that we are natives to this foreign world, and that our interactions with its other beings often reveal us to be strangers to ourselves. This is particularly true in Meyers’s snake poems, in which en-
counters with the reptiles are also often encounters with violent and usually invisible aspects of ourselves. “Two Friends Hiking at Old Santee Canal” describes a hike cut short after a surprise encounter with a snake, in which the hikers “backtrack in the safety of a path already taken,” and in “Dear Snakeskin” even the shed trace of the snake’s presence is enough to give the speaker pause: You who hold nothing hold sway over me— you, now nothing but tatter.
The speaker of Meyers’s poems participates in the struggles of the various beings described instead of occupying a privileged place apart from them, and this gives the book a great sense of urgency. The first poem in the collection, “Why Does Rain Cast This Longsome Spell?” enacts this immersion of consciousness and feeling in the natural world, breaking down the distinction between witness and scene: My hummingbird’s perch, that highest twig, has no leaves. Today, no bird. I call the vacancy sorrow.
One of the wonders of My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass is that Meyers achieves these effects with such seemingly simple language. These poems are clear-eyed and elegiac, celebratory of life’s wonders and mournful for the beings, places, feelings and things we lose along the way, including, eventually, ourselves. While nature promises a kind of eternal life in the Tennysonian “sweet repetition” of its forms, it also threatens death. Navigating this shifting ground is the poet’s concern, and uncertain terrain—unsteady bridges, crumbling cliff faces, weather-lashed lowlands—is a recurring feature of the book’s imagery. “I am no daredevil” Meyers writes in “Why I Am Not a Tightrope Walker,” but the poems in My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass suggest that these shifting grounds make daredevils of us all.