Fierce Aria by Maxima Kahn

Dear Maxima Kahn,

When wildfire smoke strangled the end of summer in a chokehold, shuttered my windows, and silenced the birds, I read your collection of poems, Fierce Aria. Growing up in Oregon, I learned how place can build root systems in your veins. The state—with its dense forests, craggy beaches, expansive gorges—has the ability to inhale you with its beauty. Living beside the sea on the Oregon Coast, the air feels impenetrable—a mixture of brine and pine trees. But this most recent  natural disaster revealed the precariousness of place—how nature can quickly turn on itself, especially as climate change worsens. Your collection of poetry offered language to make sense of “How painful it is to be human / to have taken this form in this life– / always succumbing to the slow undertow, / nothing certain but change itself.” Yours is a collection not only charged with incandescent language but also revelations about being a human wedged within nature’s grasp. 

You are merely a guide, however, as opposed to nature’s translator. You playfully divide the collection into three parts modelled after Italian musical tempos: Andante Cantabile, Adagio Mesto, Allegro Grazioso. In doing so, you and the reader are caught in a dance, moving together to these varying rhythms. “If I am writing to come into this, / you, dear reader, are helping me, / reflecting through the blind spots, / patient, silvery mirror”, you write in “Opening.” Your humility propels each page, as you welcome the reader to converse with you about the flowing, somber, and upbeat tones that frame a life. There is as much beauty in dilapidation as there is in “The apple tree pulling out of bloom / into fruit.” 

Art and creation establish a sense of control over the elements, produce a sense of permanence even if no such thing exists. “Anything could drop / at any moment and change / the whole equation– / that’s why we write and paint and sculpt, why we etch / our figures on steel plates”, you write in “Shades.” You illuminate the responsibility of the artist to awaken others to these movements. But you also address the futility of using language to examine the ineffable quality of a changing season, of flowers in bloom. “The Language of Clouds” exposes this struggle to squash the indescribable into words: “We have no vocabulary to compare with these / dialects of illumination…If I could appropriate the language of clouds, / tune its cold mastery to my mouth…If I could speak in stacked plumes, mock suns / and errant holes in the sky…Who would I be? / How does my language write me?” This puzzling question is part of the collection’s larger project. Our language is limited and pales in comparison to the sweeping drama of nature’s hand. If being fluent in nature’s language is appropriative, then we will never truly understand its ethics. This acceptance of not knowing, of falling on our knees to a cloud parting, to fog blurring the horizon line, confirms our small but important existence. 

But, while being aware of the minutiae of the natural world can awaken you, it can also bring you closer to death. “Peaches” exposes the inconspicuous nature of decay, how “a blueness began to crawl, / hidden at first, / from the underbelly on up…so it’s cast on the heap / where the fallen things, the rotten things…wait in the placid harmony of the useless / to become new life again.” This nod toward renewal at the end of the poem is also at work in “Another Dose of Pleasure.” You write, “How could we do otherwise / but take what’s given, swallow it whole, / greedy for more, another dose of pain please, / another dose of pleasure.” Developing a relationship with death may also offer you renewal in life. The story of decay is also the story of birth and life itself. 

Now, the smoke has cleared, the season has turned, and the tide continues, pushing forward and pulling back. 

Your fan,

Natalie Berger