Microbial Museum
April ship sets sail, sea freezes ripples, leaves Rothera
behind. One hundred and fifty thousand years of snowfall in
cylindrical samples, bubble-wrapped, boxed in styrofoam,
cores wrenched from ice caverns to Immingham.
Drill incises annulus ice cuttings spiral surface. Statistics
held in water vapour measure up to eons of weather.
Blueprints of other lives, the oldest ice sequesters
reservoirs of extinct creatures resurrected.
Suspending cable sonars frozen microbial cells
immortal bugs from bacteriasicles emerge, grow, divide.
Prehistoric pestilence thaws, allows ancient genes to mix with
modern ones. Skiing genotype slaloms through DNA markers,
mutating the ocean, creeping into the unsuspecting cells
of species climbing the ladder to life.
The future is thawed, dispatched into a white out.
****
Martin Redfern’s polar diary provides some useful background to this week’s poem. It begins with the “April ship” departing from Rothera, Adelaide Island, where the British Antarctic Survey research station is based. Its cargo, thrillingly representing “one hundred and fifty thousand years of snowfall” in the soil samples yielded by “cores wrenched from ice caverns” is in transport to Immingham. At this point, guided by the title, readers might assume the samples are set to become an addition to an exhibition of ancient microbes. I looked up Immingham Museum to see if it housed such an exhibition. Not so far, it seems: you’d need to travel to Amsterdam to Artis Micropia.
Micropia sounds as if it’s a fascinating place, featuring living microbes, virtual microbes and interactive installations like the Kiss-O-Meter, whose function needs no explanation. The museum’s stated goal is to promote a positive view of microbes, provide “an international platform for microbiology that brings diverse interest groups together to bridge the gap between science and the general public” and to encourage more study and research into “micro-nature”. Maya Chowdhry would probably empathise with these aims. While she devotes her recent collection, Fossil, to investigating, with wit and precision, unusual geological phenomena and the life cycles of various undersung species, her larger goal is public and eco-political.
Chowdhry relishes scientific vocabulary, and naturalises it. The terse, compressed, “notebook” syntax she favours in Microbial Museum creates documentary immediacy, an impression of events happening in quick succession, and a vertically layered depth to the language. Connective words – main verbs, articles, and so on, as well as punctuation details like the apostrophe “s” as used to indicate the possessive, may be excluded, while nouns compact into lists. They generate heat, like bodies working at some heavy physical task out of doors in sub-zero temperatures. By contrast, there’s a delicate, ethereal quality to the lines in which “Statistics / held in water vapour measure up to eons of weather”.
Chowdhry is more interested in thinking about what happens in the dark hiding places underground, or in a hypothetical future, than in Antarctic picture-painting. She’s particularly aware of sound, making the ice cores spark and hiss as the “drill incises annulus ice cuttings spiral surface”, or catching the potential rustle of wings and chitin in those “reservoirs of extinct creatures resurrected”.
At the sixth couplet, a new and violent narrative emerges for the microbes. They are not simply to be disinterred and studied, but actually resurrected by the addition of new genetic material. The invasiveness of this process is expressed in the skiing metaphor of line 12.
The poem knows that the ethics of de-extinction are dubious. Does our species’ uncontrollable inventiveness mitigate its ecological imprudence, can we fix the disruption human advance causes by an even more advanced kind of human advance? Perhaps, if all else fails, we can abandon Earth and colonise Mars. Did I say we? Well, perhaps not everyone will be on that spaceship. And how do we know we will always be clever enough and quick enough for real damage limitation?
As it develops, this poem’s focus bypasses the melting glaciers and other “usual suspects” that, tragically, have almost become cliches of global warming. In a collection that mostly delights in biodiversity, the apocalypse suddenly appears, and the bacteria of some “prehistoric pestilence” return to the ecosystem through a horrible collision of “ancient genes” and “modern ones”. “Skiing genotype slaloms through DNA markers, / mutating the ocean, creeping into the unsuspecting cells / of species climbing the ladder to life”. The final image recalls Antarctic weather conditions while bringing back the danger-verb “thaw” in a compelling oxymoron: “The future is thawed, dispatched into a white out.”
Chowdhry is a transmedia writer and artist: see her collaborative online Ripple installation. But her work is no less alive on the page, and Fossil reveals one of the most appealing voices in the new nature poetry, connecting to the magic and multiplicity of the biosphere while sounding warnings. These poems discover “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”, not only in wild flowers, but in fossil butterflies, lava, carrots and black badger Carlin peas. And they know that tears are not what’s needed: what’s needed now are thoughts leading to action.