Your Kingdom by Eleni Sikelianos

Your Kingdom
By Eleni Sikelianos
Coffee House Press, 2023

What to do with a message in a bottle? Not just any bottle but one with your name and address on it. And inside the bottle is a book of poetry by Eleni Sikelianos entitled Your Kingdom. Coffee House Press must have made some mistake sending me a copy. I have published one poem and have never reviewed a book of poetry. Ms. Sikelianos is Greek-American, and I’ve spent many years in Greece. Your Kingdom is a hybrid of words and images, as was my last novel Passing Again. Could these facts explain the bottle? I do look with favor on environmental novels that I review, and Sikelianos is a panecologist especially interested in how the “lower” forms of life contributed to the development of humans and their foolish notion that life is their “kingdom,” an orderly state they rule.

I doubt that Coffee House or Sikelianos knew that Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is the poem I know best. Your Kingdom, published 101 years after Eliot’s poem, seems in its largest impulse and form a reply to Eliot who suggested that World War I had laid waste, not just the land, but human culture. Everywhere in Your Kingdom earth is buzzing with activity, throwing up animal “cultures” that Eliot could not have imagined. Ezra Pound edited Eliot’s rather conventional draft and made the poem into a collage: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” A page of Sikelianos is like a field with a scattering of leaves, words and phrases speckling empty spaces. Like “The Waste Land,” Your Kingdom has notes, many more notes than Eliot provided and a glossary. Sikelianos wants her readers to know the various sciences that undergird her creation. She just doesn’t want her poems to have a reductive form, the kind a king might impose.

The best, most representative poem in the volume is the title work “Your Kingdom,” a 50-page epic that is preceded and followed by much shorter poems. Given the width and depth of Sikelianos’ knowledge, the scales of ecology that she is celebrating, she needs the epic length and grand voice of her Greek forebear, Homer. One grazes the catalogues (ships, armor, warriors) in The Iliad. “Your Kingdom” is all catalogues, bits and more bits of information that I think Sikelianos expects her readers, like hummingbirds, to flit among, taking what they can and moving on, always moving on like, the poet suggests, life itself. Whitman said at the end of his epic “Song of Myself,” “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Sikelianos has that same faith, not just in earth, but in her (and Whitman’s) method of wide open free verse that her readers will eventually comprehend. Even if she, using the second person as she often does, says:

“and you go dizzy from the deep

expanse of it—how to find yourself

in space in such an

animal carnival”

A lot of what is sometimes called “deep ecology” writing, whether in poetry or travel books, is blowsy with spirit and soul. Even hard-hearted Thoreau ultimately sees the Creator in a melting snowbank in Walden. At one point, Sikelianos says readers are probably waiting for some “Being” (she rarely uses capitals) to sort and save the planet. The poet is waiting for us to catch up to the world according to Darwin and the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. “Such are the facts,” she says:

“you made longer leg bones to chase, they made longer leg bones to run away

each animal adds beauty in its evolutionary tricks to hunt and hide,

to allure, to protect, attract, make meals of

to mate and to ride

waves of wild energy”

To express the wide, wild world, the poet appropriately has many voices and tones. She can criticize and hector, speak vernacular and scientific jargon, encourage and cajole, mock readers’ resistance to her all-embracing holism. Sikelianos can also be funny. After citing all life’s contributions to humans, our lungs and spine and eyes and wrinkled brains, Sikelianos says:

“it’s a wonder all your previous selves

work together as you walk

down Broadway!”

Very near the end of Your Kingdom, Sikelianos writes a kind of summary and envoi:

“you are a survivor

you, a true

chimera, cobbled

together from bits of genetic

trash like syntax and the poem folds out

from all that’s also unreadable to you”

Some of Your Kingdom is “unreadable”—if readable means every word and phrase and sentence locking into a linear, coherent line. But the words themselves are readable, as my examples illustrate. [I admit I have selected some of the more welcoming quotes.] After you have ridden along on the sublime “wild energy” of the poem, it is eminently re-readable—and re-readers will, I think, be charmed by Sikelianos’ combination of great learning, great passion, and great imitation of life’s excesses in Your Kingdom.

Your Kingdom begins with an almost-prose introduction that prepares readers for what is to come. There are short unified poems that could have had a place in the epic, and illustrations of earlier generations’ concepts of living kingdoms such as the Tree of Life. In “In the Great Hall of Bones,” Sikelianos is direct about the museum’s failure to represent humans’ living breathing ancestors. At the end of her visit and the end of the poem, she sees “a tiny little dried-up human brain [that] looks like an overgrown acorn.” The last line is “That’s how dumb you are.” Sikelianos loves old Greek words. The rest of her book is pedagogical, teaching the acorn.

The two-to-four-page poems that follow “Your Kingdom” are like travel pieces, forays into the cosmos (Greek for “world”) that Sikelianos whirled together in her epic. More than a few refer to Greek locales, fitting, I think, since the Greek language gave English the roots of ecology. One poem has a Greek title, words that mean police and hospital, and the speaker says, “I keep confusing words.” Then she remembers

“Language

is a lingering we keep hoping will draw

up exigence like water

from a well, metal

dust toward magnetite.”

The island called Hydra, she notes, is now misnamed since there is little water there. Off the coast of Crete, she hears goats saying “hey hey hey” in the morning and “ha ha ha” in the evening. In the sea off the Peloponnese, the poet experience “bioluminescence,” an accurate word she loves among all the words that fail to “draw up exigence.” In “Sparta through a Hole in the Past (Correspondences),” a poem near the end of the volume, Sikelianos becomes unusually explicit and aggressive (perhaps like an ancient Spartan) about the language she would excise from the world:

“rip the Apple

out of the body-

branch strip

it ringed

body working

the dirt rip

the ipod off”

New words for a new and archaic world--the world before humans, before animals—this is the poet’s desire not to be fulfilled, not even when words are inducted from an ancient language. But she can empty out the words—such as “kingdom”—that have led humans astray since they first grunted. This is her mission in some of the later poems, but I think she is closer to success in “Your Kingdom.” There both exact and tattered words float in large swatches of white space where in the future other, better words might arise. Not in this poem, now permanent on paper, but perhaps in the improved acorn brains of generations to come. If they come, before life follows failed words and human royal hubris into nothing.

Tom LeClair is the author of four books of literary criticism.