Dusk-Voiced by Jayne Marek

Jayne Marek’s lovely, thoughtful, deeply intellectual new book of poetry, Dusk-Voiced, offers the pensive reader twenty-four philosophical meditations not only on the nature of nature, but on humanity’s often troubled relation to it. Marek, professor emerita of English at Franklin College—part philosopher, part botanist-ecologist, and 100% poet—currently lives in what is effectively her subject: the Pacific Northwest.

Marek’s inspiration for Dusk-Voiced (a title suggesting that these poems are written at what Marek considers the end of civilization) comes from two primary sources: her father, who loved nature (according to Marek there was hardly a day when her father was not taking care of nature, whether watering the trees at a local school, creating a garden in the back yard, or picking up garbage on his way home from work), and the poet A. R. Ammons, whose book Garbage (1993) is a direct predecessor to Dusk-Voiced with its exploration of the consequences to nature of human overconsumption. If Marek’s father taught Marek to love nature, Ammons taught her to write poetry to try to honor and, if possible, to save it.

Before going further I want to comment briefly on the style of these unusual poems. Each is long (running two to three pages), and each is a loose meditation on a different aspect of humanity’s relation to the natural world. The poetry unravels in long, loose, flowing, hardly end-stopped, meandering, stream-of-consciousness lines. The style allows Marek’s mind to wander freely over the scenes it surveys, whether literal (a lake, the ocean, a sea anemone) or philosophical as she strives in these beautiful lyrical melancholy meditations to do what the heroic poet can to praise nature as she thinks about human beings in relation to it.

Some of the larger questions we are asked to consider in reading Dusk-Voiced include: Is nature itself morally amiss? Is greed—our gross and rampant materialistic impulse—forgivable when weighed against human fear of death? Will humans survive in their current forms? Will nature outlast us? What are we to do in our despairing realization that we are swiftly and systematically killing the animals—and the planet—on which we depend? If in each of these poems you find Marek the prophet decrying human greed, you will also find Marek the nature lover variously: examining an X-ray to see the scrawny bone tracings of a beloved cat, photographing garbage-raiding racoons behind a living room picture window, and lifting heavy bags of soil to re-fertilize a garden in the increasingly arid Pacific Northwest.

The book begins with “The Waters,” a finalist for the Yemassee Poetry Prize, about what has been dubbed “The Pacific Garbage Patch,” a 7.7-million-square-mile area in the Pacific Ocean between the North American continent and Japan teeming in places with undigested human garbage. The poem is an excellent example of Marek’s deeply informed, ecologically-minded observation of the natural world. As the poem points out, the Pacific Ocean is the home of the “Mariana Trench,” the lowest point in the world. Marek describes the Mariana Trench as populated with monsters unimaginable // to humans such as filamentous / amorphous mollusks and leatherskinned fishes. These monsters are perfectly adapted to survive in the hot flow [of] hydrothermal vents, but they are ill-equipped to survive human refuse. Too many levels // of movement are required to bring down the plastic bags (needed to clean // rich people’s faces), so the bags we leave behind are left to float in the ocean’s water columns. In concluding the poem, Marek reminds us with pointed irony that those responsible for polluting the Pacific are susceptible to getting cancer and dying from the very plastic they litter with and that, in this sense, humans do indeed resemble the Pacific Ocean / garbage patch, inside and out.  

Each poem shows how adept Marek is at detailed portraits of everyday wildlife. In “Between Day and Evening,” Marek stumbles while gardening upon a dead towhee lying under a tree with not much orange // on its flank. The towhee is sprawled in the brush with its head buried in the grass / and its back at a strange angle, like a // broken shoe. In “Growing Things,” Marek spots a dying wood rat. Surely, she writes, the newly born wood rat pup believes it should still be nursing; instead, it lies dying in an attitude of pain, its pin-end teeth / closing and releasing in silence. In “Contractile Flesh,” Marek scans plumose anemones, banana slugs, and sea cucumbers; of the sea cucumbers she writes:

the small orange-red

specimens I have noticed at low tide that slip out
from under rock shelves to loll in shallows,

protrud[e] their bright blunt ends, until a curious finger
or a crab’s touch triggers swift withdrawal.

Against such specific observations, Marek’s condemnation of humanity’s carelessness can crack like a whip. We should all feel the heat of shame, she writes, at the waste of potential of this ruined earth. As if the world weren’t already littered with discards and left- / overs, the machines of capitalism insist on churning out // more and more stuff. We live in the midst of expanding starvation and homelessness among / humans and animals alike, and in a wreckage of toxic waste // and landfills. Still we overdevelop, we poison, we gut, we frack, we trash, we maim, we kill. Our fate, Marek writes, for these and other sins, is impending annihilation.

And yet, for all her excoriations, Marek also turns a compassionate eye on humans who seem to “know not what they do.” What is it about the instability of the human condition, she wonders in several poems, that makes us so obsessed with things? Why are we so attracted to capitalism? Why are we helpless in the grip of cell phones and computer screens? Is it fear of dying that makes us such passionate consumers, she asks? Woe is the human, she seems to say, for we may as well dig our own graves as try to make our lives better with “stuff.” We are so small and inconsequential, of such small // scale, she writes in “Not Despair.” As animal lives are brief, so are human lives. As animals inhabit an uneven landscape of existence and extinction, so do we; as animals live in a horrible ballet of waiting, so do we. For us, as for the animals, with one false move, death may sweep suddenly down on dark wings and turn our lovely atmosphere of the morning into a mourning.

As if the world weren’t already littered with discards and leftovers, the machines of capitalism insist on churning out more and more stuff.

Marek’s frequent tone of equanimity surprises me. Throughout, instead of panicking at loss, she seems to look upon the whole of earth, time past and to come, with a temperate eye. In the end, she says, we should “Not Despair.” Against the moral horror of what we have done to this world; against the surety of the mortality of humanity itself; and despite that each of us must, sadly, individually, die, Marek finds consolation in the simple complexities of love, beauty, and art. For Marek, the sheer gorgeousness of the world is abundant recompense for the losses we suffer. A solitary violet, unfurling alone upon the forest floor, seen by one who takes the time to see, is enough to sustain life; it is enough to give the pained human consciousness balance and sanctity, for we have this one wonderful sensory gift, what Marek calls landedness, in this world. Beyond that, Marek muses, as if she were sitting down to somebody’s last supper, what else can one do but offer our thoughts and wishes to // the people of the future, who surely will be like us (if with more anger and desperation). And what else can one do—as she writes in one of her many superbly lovely, elegiac closing lines—but look at family and friends whom we love and like and whom we know and forgive and watch them as they flutter briefly on fragile wings for whatever time is left.

---

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals, among them Pleiades, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Pennsylvania English, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, and Delmarva Review. She lives in Oxford, CT.

*We were deeply saddened to learn that Jayne Marek passed away in January 2025. As such, this method of ordering her final book may no longer be available.