book review: the forest of sure things by megan snyder-camp

Megan Snyder-Camp does not ask easy questions of the American consciousness in her poetry collection The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press: 2010). Split into two parts, she explores both her own journey as a mother as well as the story of a family in the Pacific North-West, who had the first child in the town in over a century, and whose second child was still-born. With roots in the Pacific North-West myself, Snyder-Camp’s recurring symbolism of the ocean in the context of the collection strikes true with my perception of the importance bodies of water have in our experience of place. Seattle, the city I’m sometimes from, is interesting in how its assertive urbanness contrasts with the precariousness of its geography, sitting just below an active volcano and fragmented by the dominating force of the Puget Sound. The significance and symbolism of the sea is established from the very beginning in her opening poem, “Sea Creatures of the Deep”, as she begins the collection with an appeal: 

O sockeye O rock sole O starry flounder

O red Irish lord O spiny lumpsucker

The, sea in this collection encapsulates the precariousness I feel not only in Seattle and the Pacific North-West, but the entirety of the fundamental paradox that lies at the center of American life. It is not a coincidence that these sea creatures she names are sea creatures of the sea floor. Tangentially, I am reminded of the one of the orishas of the ocean in the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, Olokun, who is different from other deities of the ocean such as Yemaya, in that he is the orisha of the ocean floor: what the light doesn’t touch. In a way, what is inevitably mysterious to us, and this is what is appealed to throughout the narrative. 

The antithesis of the sea seems to be the forest Snyder-Camp names, as in the poem from which the book takes its names. She questions what seems close to arrogance in our certainty that our children will always be safe and will always be born living, our assumption that children…

study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books

any soldier who stumbles will never fall. No one will fall

This is the story of a family forced to reckon with the instability of life: with loss. The poet not only asks what the sea takes, but also brings back to us, particularly in her poem season:

“The oranges were the first to arrive

bobbing along the shore like subtitles 

Oranges sometimes but never children. In many ways I see America as a land of promises - promises implying certainty. Snyder-Camp reveals this is always an illusion.

Remi Seamon is a young poet who spends her time split between Cambridge, England and Seattle, Washington. She received an honourable mention in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year award and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Unlost, Clementine Unbound, Rat’s Ass Review, underblong and streetcake, among others. She considers her greatest inspiration to be her dog.