Stepping ‘into the cataclysm’

Say It
by Jan Zwicky

Victoria: Deer Mountain Pages, 2025
$15.00 / 9781778235849

Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith

*

Quadra Island writer Jan Zwicky’s Say It is a powerful, widely researched litany of numerical statistics, corporate brands, and chemical names.

Zwicky’s tight focus—on industrial and human impacts on planet Earth—accumulates undeniable truths, so overwhelming, that we usually and distractedly glide over them, or bury them, daily. This 19-page chapbook poem confronts us—it weighs and stuns with blunt data, poetically rendered.

The piece opens, calling on a muse, to speak of the wide sweep of—what shall I call it?—Time? Event? Existence? Nature, human and planetary? 

With a few quick strokes, Zwicky reaches from the deepest ocean zone to reference some of humanity’s worst horrors, and a questioning—

                                             Tell me what
        a human being is,
and how a human being might still think and breathe,
       might step
 clear minded into the cataclysm.

So begins the statements of affliction—rain and floods: “2000 landslides”; “630,000 chickens drowned”—fires and draughts: “In Oregon, Western Red Cedars dying. A million acres of dead firs.” Then come anthrax and Cruise missiles. And these are just a start. 

What is sounding like a terrifying list (and it is—stick around), is mitigated, narratively speaking, by Zwicky’s brief return to the personal and particular: “Down at the bottom of the garden: the this and this and this / that I still love. Whose deaths bring sorrow / even though new life’s not possible without them.”

In her rendering of existential extremes, Zwicky (Once Upon a Time in the West) speaks of “Strife, then, and love, the patterns they make / resisting one another”, of beauty and cruelty, and a list of corporeal horrors. From such vivid witnessing, the poet moves us with the tools of poetic trade—the power of language itself, and a form of chorusing of “our need to have it,” in 42 lines, as in this excerpt:

in the name of comfort 
in the name of distraction 
in the name of glitter, or gadgetry, of disposability
in the name of not having to think
in the name of niftiness
in the name of longer shelf life
[…]
in the name of the nameless, the apocalypse no one
      will own

Litany is the word; we’re not off the hook yet—the tions, the ings, the eds—“desertification,” “debeaking,” “plastic-wrapped,” to choose just a few. Then come the incomprehensible numbers: “1,180,000 kilometres of oil and gas pipelines, enough to / circle the Earth three times”; “emissions from global food waste, a billion tons a year.” The statistics go on, the numbers overwhelm. Then the pollutants: “chlorothalonil / pendimethalin / ametryn / metolachlor” […] “benzene, toluene, and xylene. Butadiene.”  

We read, forced to face—nouns, names, numbers, the numbing reality of the corporate, chemical, careless consumption that gnaws at, that compromises and consumes our world, our climate, our Earth… our existence.

How are these blunt facts poetry? Zwicky is not unaware of the music in the layering of these words—the rhyming, the rhythms, the stanzaic structures, repetitions and the shifts in semantics and tone. In the listing, the poet is crafting, yet holding her voice-of-address way back behind the facts. 

With timing, on the penultimate page Zwicky steps forward, returning to the first person: “I held papyrus once, three thousand years / after its making.” Then the ending lifts a bit—back in the garden, at the hollyhocks “swaying slightly as they rise into the heat,” where the speaker sees “a stranger,” observing. But what brings that heat, and the visitor? Is the poet speaking of herself as the stranger, in this strange and tinged land? Is the stranger all of us, estranged from the realities Zwicky has accumulated, from our very selves, our (well)-being. She makes us look—and see. Or do we look away?

Beauty exists, but as Hopkins wrote, almost 150 years ago “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; […] the soil / Is bare now.” Then 77 years later Ginsberg wrote: “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose / blood is running money!” And now, 71 years since, we have Say It—poetry as witness. It’s a call-out, a must-read.

Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling with words and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, swayed by experimenters in early Toronto days, juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven volume poetic series fluttertongue. His decades-long westward migration through Canada’s landscapes implanted continuing amazement and many poetic influences. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, from Radiant Press. Most recently, The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall appeared in 2024. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. He is currently absorbed in a rappy-spoken-word album project, as SloLo Smithy, streaming on BandCamp. [Editor’s note: Steven reviewed Joanna Streetly, Mary Ann Moore, Sharon Thesen, and Jacqueline Bell, Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Harold Rhenisch, Kevin Spenst, Eimear Laffan, and Tim Lilburn for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster