Singing for all lives

In the spooky, furious poems of CAConrad, death is a constant presence. The voices of ghosts – lovers, family, friends who died of Aids – “whisper in my ear to help me make poems”, they have said.
Their previous collection of poems, which was dedicated to lost sounds, emerged out of a set of poetic rituals dubbed “Resurrect”. Conrad, at that time living itinerantly in a van, lay down in parking lots across America and used speakers to flood their body with field recordings of vanished mammals, reptiles and birds. “When species become extinct”, Conrad writes in an accompanying essay, “they take their sounds with them: breath, footfall, heartbeat, wing flutter, cry, and song”. The “Resurrect” poems record this “vibrational absence”.

But rather than lamenting what has disappeared or anticipating future annihilations, Conrad’s latest collection, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, is firmly planted in what they call the “extreme present”. The creatures animating these poems aren’t endangered or extinct, but common, even abundant – deer, mouse, dove, quail, lizard, squirrel. Self-describing as “the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift”, Conrad clearly sides with the scorned – those who, like the rat and pigeon (singled out as special comrades), have nevertheless “found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene”. If there’s a lesson here, it is, as one poem puts it, “to / desire / the world / as it is / not as / it was”.

The poems are anything but plainly didactic, yet they often verge on it, sly and winking. “I’m a poet / not a motivational speaker”, Conrad writes; then, with deadpan delivery: “we kill 3000 silkworms / to make one / pound / of silk”. These sharp interruptions in the rhythm are characteristic: these are nebulous concrete poems whose lines come apart in small gusts, collide and coil intricately downwards, hugging the bottom of the page. If you squint, you might see animals in them: a grebe with bit of algae hanging from its mouth; a blue marlin; a seahorse.

The poems’ acoustics are just as striking as their shapes, playing with the sonic echoes and lilting iambs commonly found in nursery rhymes. Note how a long i sound is thrown through these lines, then boomerangs back: “I saw a spider eat a fly / I saw a praying mantis / eat the spider / I did not mean / to see these things / the spider caught my eye”. The speaker is an alert, if unhappy, witness to the damage.

More than a century ago, Robert Frost’s oven bird, a small but noisy warbler whose woodland home is increasingly covered in “highway dust”, asked again and again a question of its world: “what to make of a diminished thing”. Conrad’s answer resounds over the dust and din of the extreme present: “we sing / keep / living / keep alive / singing for / all lives at risk”.

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