Claire Wahmanholm's Meltwater: Mourning What is Lost

                In the world's rich dirt 
                I could have planted brambles, clovers. I could have just loved
                the earth instead of inventing new ways to hurt. 

These lines, from the poem "You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You," succinctly and beautifully hint at what Claire Wahmanholm explores, examines, and mourns in her newest collection. An expansive book—spanning over 100 pages—Wahmanholm's Meltwater investigates the natural world's depleted state, specifically highlighting humanity's role in the environment's degradation. Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.

In the lines included above, the speaker laments her inability to revel in the earth's beauty., choosing instead to her time "inventing new ways to hurt." As the poem continues, Wahmanholm writes, "Half our genome / is shared with fruit, more with fish, the most with ghosts," and it is here that she introduces the recurring theme of interconnectivity. As Wahmanholm compares human DNA to that of fruit, fish, and ghosts, she reminds readers of how closely humans resemble other lifeforms—both the species that remain and the "ghosts" that have gone extinct.

Throughout this collection, its use of repetition draws attention to the severity of the current environmental disaster. By including poems with titles like "Glacier" and "Meltwater"—both of which chronicle effects of climate change—Wahmanholm builds further anxiety around the subject. In the first "Glacier" poem, she writes:

The glacier's skin smelled like pine, snowcloud, bog, lichen. There were stanchions around the ice so the audience wouldn't touch or lick its weeping face. Some people had brought their children. Our brains stuttered. 

In these lines, the speaker sets the scene as she describes glacier-melting as a roadside attraction or a modern circus show. The poem depicts a potential future that is not far off: one in which a glacier's meltwater becomes a souvenir like a figurine or snow globe, with vials collected "from all five glaciers lined up on [...] mantels like Hummels." As if the reminder that meltwater will soon become a relic of an earlier time is not horrifying enough, Wahmanholm then takes the poem further, reminding readers of our own complicity in the changing climate: "For an additional five hundred dollars you could mount a ladder and point a hair dryer at the glacier for two minutes." This poem effectively implicates us as it showcases humans' negative impact on the environment and our contrasting denial of that reality.

The collection's first iteration of "Meltwater" follows "Glacier," again addressing our impending ecological collapse: 

                O                                 uncommonly sunny
                                                                                                    death

 
                                    that 


                brightened

                                                                                ​the 


                summer 
                                        snow.

Blunt language such as "O / uncommonly sunny // death" clearly illustrates the conflict within the narrative, but the sparse form of "Meltwater" does just as much work. The use of heavy enjambment and white space forces readers to experience the poem slowly as tension continues to mount.

Later, "In a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would be Very Bad if I Died" offers a rumination on the environment through the lens of new motherhood. Wahmanholm writes:

                                                She holds my breath when we see
                a mother duck and a duckling that would not know
                if she died. We are not that kind. Our kind keens
                for a long time and the sadness accumulates in our bodies 
                like lead or tapeworm eggs. I feel sorry for all of us,
                the leaving and the left. Everything is bearing down, 
                bearing down. 

Here, the speaker addresses the natural world in a slightly different way from earlier poems—one that highlights how "our kind" often grieves across species. While Wahmanholm is hyper-aware of the destruction around her, she recognizes that the ducks in the poem, on the other hand, would not grieve human death. In the context of the collection at large, the notion of "bearing down" then addresses all three definitions of the term: 

         1. the image of a woman in labor, 
         2. the idea of being overtaken and weighed heavily on, 

and, finally, the more violent definition: 

         3. moving directly toward something in an intimidating manner.

Indeed, Wahmanholm wrestles with the idea of mourning throughout the collection and simultaneously recognizes that humanity's advanced emotional world exists only alongside our propensity for destruction. 

While Meltwater is very much a meditation on what our planet has already lost, it is also a collection that grapples with what one still has but could lose at any moment. Wahmanholm showcases this dread of imminent loss in "The New Horticulture":

                There is sad green and there is scared green and a green
                for dread and one for when we can't get out of bed
                in the afternoon. We used to feel nostalgic at the smell
                of cut grass, but now the sweet half is gone. Now we feel lonely 
                and panicked as sirens when we pass a fresh lawn.

In this passage, the speaker sees a world irreparably altered—one where bees and flowers have been eradicated, one where its inhabitants fear the looming loss. This new dread is clear particularly in the latter two sentences, where the scent of fresh grass no longer brings nostalgia but rather a reminder of local ecosystem devastation and aquifer depletion.

It is important to note that, despite its context, there are small moments of optimism in this collection. In "The Future," for example, Wahmanholm writes, "I am mostly glad about most things, even / the future, even though I know that broken // shells may float on its waters." Despite these few hopeful moments, though, Meltwater insists on chronicling Earth’s destruction with unflinching honesty; several poems are Brechtian in their eschewal of lyricism that refuses the reader any catharsis. Wahmanholm states our hopelessness plainly, forbidding readers from forgetting the environmental collapse with which we live:

                The single starling is shot down
                and its absence is swallowed by the billowing flock.
                ​The song is tuneless as a river of dry rocks.

Order a copy of Meltwater here.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater, Redmouth, and Wilder, which won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award.

Marissa Ahmadkhani has been published in journals such as Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3, The Journal, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015, 2017, and 2022. She lives in Southern California.