Poetry review – LOOSESTRIFE FOR PORCUPINES: Charles Rammelkamp admires a well-observed new collection by D. M. Gordon
Loosestrife for Porcupines
D. M. Gordon
Blue Light Press, 2026
$17.00, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4218-3600-3
‘What is the word for brutal beauty?’ D.M. Gordon asks in the prose poem, “Questions from the Verge.” He goes on to say ‘There should be one.’ Indeed, perhaps the word is “Life.” In poem after poem in this lyrical collection of verse- and prose-poems, Gordon brings the fierce, pitiless majesty of the natural world into focus. Again, in “The Nth November,” she declares, ‘I wish I could embrace this wordless blanketing,’ referring to the annual cyclical death of nature during the bleak winter months, the word “blanketing” evoking an image of snow-covered fields that comes directly into our senses without words. She goes on:
treasure how the window glass keeps out the cold,
knowing that everything dirty, withered, now snow-hidden,
will be overwhelmed with new growth in time.
And I wish I could say to the un-savable world
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in.
The elusive Age of Aquarius: is it even possible? Is the world truly un-savable? Sometimes, though not often, D. M. Gordon conflates the political turmoil of human society with the world that just is. They’re distinguishable but not separable; only, there’s no intention in the brutality of nature as there appears to be with humans. She makes this clear in her charming “A Brief History,” which begins with ‘The rain came first. Or was it soil? / A seed. Then a bird that shat the seed’ and then cycles through the life of grains that become our food, a recurring process, even as ‘the nation tears itself apart again,’ as she puts it in “The Nth November,” or even ‘as democracy crumbles and people are dying, there is a grocery store,’ as she puts it in “Evolution.” In describing the ‘hunger which drives us all,’ in “Questions from the Verge” she shows us that brutal beauty:
Here where I live, the long field is all. Loosestrife for porcupines, timothy
or deer. For the cruising hawk, restless mice with adorable ears. Mice for
he lanky wild dog. Mice for owls. They need to keep swarms of pink
abies coming, mice do.
For humans, there’s a greater goal than survival, namely happiness. Just as Aristotle argued in Nicomachean Ethics, happiness is the only thing desired for its own sake, rather than as a means to another end. From the outset, D. M. Gordon concurs. In the first piece, the prose poem “Tournaments,” she asks, ‘Have we been wise?…Have we grasped our small happinesses…,’ and in the second poem, “Radishes,” she asks, ‘And isn’t happiness the one imperative?’
Even to approach happiness, we must learn to slow down, observe. Lentamente, she writes in “Radishes,” slowly: ‘there’s something about slow.’ In “Living Rock, Losing Sky” Gordon implicitly enjoins us to just breathe. She starts: ‘From the book of hours, at dawn I inhale. Navel to lungs, sinus, cortex.’ Later, ‘I inhale. Exhale.’ The poem concludes: ‘…the sky is emptying while we bicker and love. Love and bicker. Breathe in. Breathe out.’
Porcupines, birds, spiders, bears, horses, capybaras and other animals – her beloved dogs, Brio and Luna – surround the poet; she immerses herself in the natural world. When she cannot sleep, she drives out into the country to see the stars (“Self-Comfort”: ‘Trolling backroads in the loneliest small hours’). Charmingly, in “Conversation with a Bivalve in Blue Light” she recounts an imagined dialogue with an oyster (while ‘fiddler crabs raised their machine-gun claws like a cluster of tiny gangsters’) which ends with her eating the oyster. It ‘slips alive down my throat, a little mignonette and wasabi, the closest I, the civilized, the compassionate fan of butterflies and dung beetles, come to heathen.’ D. M. Gordon’s ruminations on nature even take her to the molecular level. In “Quantum of O” she muses about muons and quarks (‘The old singers were right, we are stardust…’).
Throughout the four dozen contemplative pieces that make up Loosestrife for Porcupines, D. M. Gordon celebrates the various species. “Hydrochoerus Hydrochaeris is for the capybara (‘For a time they sit. Zazen. Round-eared, slow-minded, attuned to the now’); “Argiope Aurantia” is for the golden garden spider – “the writing spider” (‘You publish a truth, poet, which I desire / and cannot read’); “Equus Ferus Caballus” is the horse; “Ursus Americanus” is the American black bear – sadly, a black bear dying in the field beyond her house. “Eagle” extols the majestic bird in the sky (‘Fiercer than my throat’). “Picolets” considers various birds (‘fist-sized feathered divas’ that ‘yearn and sing. And yearn. / And sing. / And sing.’). Double Helix” is in praise of spiders (‘the tiny tightrope walkers’). Similarly, she extols trees in “In Desperation, Trees,” in which, instead of counting sheep when she is insomniac, she counts trees (‘Copper beech. Dawn redwood…’).
Gordon also has a sly sense of humor. “Vast Letter” humorously engages with a scam email from a troll seeking money. In “The Rapture,” a poem that otherwise celebrates spiders, she channels the eschatological belief that certain individuals will be suddenly taken up to heaven to meet Jesus Christ. Only here, it’s the spiders!
People saw it as a sign, and we gathered
at the church. We prayed. They crawled
up the steeple. Then the news reported
arachnids on the One World Trade Center
and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Spiders
scrabbled toward the sky; heartier specimens
stowed away in Sherpa packs on Everest
and engineers noticed them on launch pads.
On the second day the front page of the Times
showed them on the cheeks of the Sphinx.
We prayed harder, begged atonement, ready
to relinquish earthly things with nervous joy.
My brother came home from LSU.
The stock exchanges stopped. People spoke
in tongues or wept, and everyone
sent pictures from their cell phones.
And yet at the same time she exalts nature, for ‘The Rapture was not for us. / It was the spiders that God called.’
Gordon also writes in admiration of art as well as nature. “Hockney on Sunday” and “Cloud Nebulae, Abstract on Tuesday” are ekphrastic pieces, while in “Too Many Moons” she ruminates on Shakespeare and characters from myth that enliven civilization, as well as an appreciation of Brahms. “Little Owl, Little Horse” considers a four-thousand-year-old jade artifact, and in “Longing for Mozart” she seeks solace in the piano (‘There has been violence and I am not innocent’).
How can we be happy in this world? Take some guidance from D. M. Gordon’s thoughtful writing. Pause, look around. Breathe. Appreciate.
May 6 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – D M Gordon
Poetry review – LOOSESTRIFE FOR PORCUPINES: Charles Rammelkamp admires a well-observed new collection by D. M. Gordon
Loosestrife for Porcupines
D. M. Gordon
Blue Light Press, 2026
$17.00, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4218-3600-3
‘What is the word for brutal beauty?’ D.M. Gordon asks in the prose poem, “Questions from the Verge.” He goes on to say ‘There should be one.’ Indeed, perhaps the word is “Life.” In poem after poem in this lyrical collection of verse- and prose-poems, Gordon brings the fierce, pitiless majesty of the natural world into focus. Again, in “The Nth November,” she declares, ‘I wish I could embrace this wordless blanketing,’ referring to the annual cyclical death of nature during the bleak winter months, the word “blanketing” evoking an image of snow-covered fields that comes directly into our senses without words. She goes on:
treasure how the window glass keeps out the cold,
knowing that everything dirty, withered, now snow-hidden,
will be overwhelmed with new growth in time.
And I wish I could say to the un-savable world
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in.
The elusive Age of Aquarius: is it even possible? Is the world truly un-savable? Sometimes, though not often, D. M. Gordon conflates the political turmoil of human society with the world that just is. They’re distinguishable but not separable; only, there’s no intention in the brutality of nature as there appears to be with humans. She makes this clear in her charming “A Brief History,” which begins with ‘The rain came first. Or was it soil? / A seed. Then a bird that shat the seed’ and then cycles through the life of grains that become our food, a recurring process, even as ‘the nation tears itself apart again,’ as she puts it in “The Nth November,” or even ‘as democracy crumbles and people are dying, there is a grocery store,’ as she puts it in “Evolution.” In describing the ‘hunger which drives us all,’ in “Questions from the Verge” she shows us that brutal beauty:
Here where I live, the long field is all. Loosestrife for porcupines, timothy
or deer. For the cruising hawk, restless mice with adorable ears. Mice for
he lanky wild dog. Mice for owls. They need to keep swarms of pink
abies coming, mice do.
For humans, there’s a greater goal than survival, namely happiness. Just as Aristotle argued in Nicomachean Ethics, happiness is the only thing desired for its own sake, rather than as a means to another end. From the outset, D. M. Gordon concurs. In the first piece, the prose poem “Tournaments,” she asks, ‘Have we been wise?…Have we grasped our small happinesses…,’ and in the second poem, “Radishes,” she asks, ‘And isn’t happiness the one imperative?’
Even to approach happiness, we must learn to slow down, observe. Lentamente, she writes in “Radishes,” slowly: ‘there’s something about slow.’ In “Living Rock, Losing Sky” Gordon implicitly enjoins us to just breathe. She starts: ‘From the book of hours, at dawn I inhale. Navel to lungs, sinus, cortex.’ Later, ‘I inhale. Exhale.’ The poem concludes: ‘…the sky is emptying while we bicker and love. Love and bicker. Breathe in. Breathe out.’
Porcupines, birds, spiders, bears, horses, capybaras and other animals – her beloved dogs, Brio and Luna – surround the poet; she immerses herself in the natural world. When she cannot sleep, she drives out into the country to see the stars (“Self-Comfort”: ‘Trolling backroads in the loneliest small hours’). Charmingly, in “Conversation with a Bivalve in Blue Light” she recounts an imagined dialogue with an oyster (while ‘fiddler crabs raised their machine-gun claws like a cluster of tiny gangsters’) which ends with her eating the oyster. It ‘slips alive down my throat, a little mignonette and wasabi, the closest I, the civilized, the compassionate fan of butterflies and dung beetles, come to heathen.’ D. M. Gordon’s ruminations on nature even take her to the molecular level. In “Quantum of O” she muses about muons and quarks (‘The old singers were right, we are stardust…’).
Throughout the four dozen contemplative pieces that make up Loosestrife for Porcupines, D. M. Gordon celebrates the various species. “Hydrochoerus Hydrochaeris is for the capybara (‘For a time they sit. Zazen. Round-eared, slow-minded, attuned to the now’); “Argiope Aurantia” is for the golden garden spider – “the writing spider” (‘You publish a truth, poet, which I desire / and cannot read’); “Equus Ferus Caballus” is the horse; “Ursus Americanus” is the American black bear – sadly, a black bear dying in the field beyond her house. “Eagle” extols the majestic bird in the sky (‘Fiercer than my throat’). “Picolets” considers various birds (‘fist-sized feathered divas’ that ‘yearn and sing. And yearn. / And sing. / And sing.’). Double Helix” is in praise of spiders (‘the tiny tightrope walkers’). Similarly, she extols trees in “In Desperation, Trees,” in which, instead of counting sheep when she is insomniac, she counts trees (‘Copper beech. Dawn redwood…’).
Gordon also has a sly sense of humor. “Vast Letter” humorously engages with a scam email from a troll seeking money. In “The Rapture,” a poem that otherwise celebrates spiders, she channels the eschatological belief that certain individuals will be suddenly taken up to heaven to meet Jesus Christ. Only here, it’s the spiders!
People saw it as a sign, and we gathered
at the church. We prayed. They crawled
up the steeple. Then the news reported
arachnids on the One World Trade Center
and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Spiders
scrabbled toward the sky; heartier specimens
stowed away in Sherpa packs on Everest
and engineers noticed them on launch pads.
On the second day the front page of the Times
showed them on the cheeks of the Sphinx.
We prayed harder, begged atonement, ready
to relinquish earthly things with nervous joy.
My brother came home from LSU.
The stock exchanges stopped. People spoke
in tongues or wept, and everyone
sent pictures from their cell phones.
And yet at the same time she exalts nature, for ‘The Rapture was not for us. / It was the spiders that God called.’
Gordon also writes in admiration of art as well as nature. “Hockney on Sunday” and “Cloud Nebulae, Abstract on Tuesday” are ekphrastic pieces, while in “Too Many Moons” she ruminates on Shakespeare and characters from myth that enliven civilization, as well as an appreciation of Brahms. “Little Owl, Little Horse” considers a four-thousand-year-old jade artifact, and in “Longing for Mozart” she seeks solace in the piano (‘There has been violence and I am not innocent’).
How can we be happy in this world? Take some guidance from D. M. Gordon’s thoughtful writing. Pause, look around. Breathe. Appreciate.