By Joshua Lew McDermott
Of Spray and Mist, the latest collection from poet and multimedia artist Greg Bem is a mesmerizing entanglement of poems that flit between prayers to nature’s wonders and the sharp observations of a naturalist, between a cerebral cataloguing of the human experience and the earthy reality of hiking in the woods in the rain.
Of Spray and Mist is the third book from legendary counterculture poet Charles Potts’ first sustained publishing outlet in years, Hand to Mouth Books out of Walla Walla, Washington. As an adopted Seattlite himself, Bem’s book is very much home among the environmental and spiritual poetry that has come to define much of the Pacific Northwest’s poetic legacy. It is the book’s rain-washed Northwest setting that serves as the foundation of the collection: “We all blend in here. We are all northern. / The sense of longing to be well built. Sturdy,” Bem observes in “Northern Interiors.”
But Bem’s book is also a species of its own. In many instances, the book is a collection of series of poems rather than stand alone verses; series with titles such as “Indexes,” “Current Research,” and “Bountiful Sounds.” The subject matter and the range between poems and sequences is wide, and the voice of the collection is refreshingly dynamic. But, along with the vivid imagery of lakes and harbors, pines and cabins, a steady tone of both wisdom and the humility of exploration give the book a cohesive center. From vivid images communicated in sparse narrative such as the fantastic sequence in the poem “After T” which reads “The rain is rough. You’re in a / t-shirt. It’s nice meeting you” to the impressionistic imagery of the untitled poems in the “Current Research” series that carry phrases such as “The morning is galvanized with expression of limbs, gestures of hair, scents / that keep me capsized upon my own morphing shores” and still to the razor of dissection and deconstruction in lines like “Systems within systems come together with maps. With tools. With charting / and plotting. A boat with a figure in yellow, white hair down to shoulders” from the opening section’s “Defining the Map,” the collection’s dynamism is its strength.
And though the vast majority of the collection is written in prose, many of the poems pulse with syncopated rhythms reminisce of electronic ambiance, provided by short, terse sentences. Those poems that do utilize line-breaks do so thoughtfully, such as the book’s opener, “Before and During the Rain.”
Perhaps it makes sense that Bem himself is a librarian. In many ways, the collection is a meditation on cataloguing: cataloguing the weather, the trees, cataloguing the mind, mortality, intimacy. The collection really sings, however, when the struggle for knowledge, order, and understanding give way to awe, mystery, intimacy. The beauty of the book is that it surrenders to the truth that classification, that trying to make sense of the way a rain-soaked forest makes one feel, is an exercise in futility, albeit a fun and worthwhile one.
Beneath the landscape of sense-making in these poems lies the primitive and fundamental. “The mediocrity of the wisdom of replacing what has been before. / And this is knuckling into the hillside the way it was remembered,” says Bem in “First of Everything.” Bodies. Blood. Dirt. Rivers and mud. Concrete images jut out in the collection as impactful as broken bones and give both the collection’s spiritual and intellectual meditations a grounding in sensuality. “And the white waters flow like a tourniquet of snot or semen as we kiss our / foundations to blessing” reads my favorite line from “Lived and Violence.”
In terms of sensuality, the entire collection is made full by the flooding, overflowing, and drizzle of water – the cohesive image of the book.
“I imagine the dead, as they dehydrate, and get re-hydrated in their womb-like / coffins, water leaking through the ground and shuddering entire systems of / body. The shudder is like a shiver: we give into it,” reads “The Dead and the Water.”
Such is the current of Bem’s powerful book.
Of Spray and Mist can be bought directly from Greg Bem here: A Book! Of Spray and Mist – Greg Bem.