'Toxic Flora,' by Kimiko Hahn Reviewed by Meera Lester
Award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn’s interest in science, especially paleobotany, biology, and astronomy, served as inspiration for her poems in Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton & Company, May 2010). This new collection, her eighth book of poetry, was inspired by articles from the weekly “Science” section of The New York Times.
Hahn uses scientific facts and new discoveries about the peculiarities of the natural world as grist to create her poems. Many titles are titillating: “On Deceit as Survival,” “For the Affection of Ants,” and “On Fidelity,” the latter about the antiphonal song of Australian magpie-larks. These lead the reader to learning about some scientific oddity or observation and the poet’s linkage to the human relevance.
Hahn explores the parallels between the natural world’s extremes of struggling, bonding, leaving, and loving and those of human relationships. She uses language that is precise, lyrical, sensual, haunting, and at times heartbreaking. Her poems are often in response to the news of some loss, extinction, or historical or scientific discovery. Hahn conveys a personal connection to or resonance with the event. She is adept at combining fact with feeling and her use of metaphor is truly remarkable.
In “The Perpetuation of Sorrow,” she juxtaposes the instinctual activity of the cowbird and her own sense of motherhood.
When we fragment forests we create an excellent habitat for the cowbird
Whose females shove the eggs out from the songbird nests And substitute their own For those full-time mothers to hatch A spiral for which I am sorry. I couldn’t help myself.
Author Kimiko and Trudy (photo: Harold Schechter)
Between pages of poems in Toxic Flora, there are pages where she shares an untitled personal vignette, memory, observation. These, too, add richness to the collection. For example, one about praying mantises that she observed but didn’t linger to watch, choosing to return the next day “to check for evidence on the ground” and another about sexual cannibalism having to do with ritual, “to which animals, like ourselves, must submit.”
Hahn holds a master’s degree in Japanese literature. Her parents were artists. Her mother, of Japanese ancestry, was born in Hawaii and her father, of German ancestry, was from Wisconsin. She has been awarded the American Book Award, a Theodore Roethke Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, among others. Her other books include Air Pocket (1989), Earshot (1992), The Unbearable Heart (1995), Volatile (1999), and Mosquito and Ant (1999). She currently teaches at Queens College at City University in New York.
Meera Lester has written reviews for Manoa, a Pacific Journal of International Writing, India Currents Magazine, The Small Press Magazine, and other publications. An internationally published author of articles, columns, and over two dozen books, her newest book is The Marriage Devotional (Adams Media, September 2010). Lester’s Everything Law of Attraction Book (Adams Media, 2008) has just been translated into French. She is the author of Animal Beat’s “Dispatches from the Farmette.”
