Now Voyager by Cynthia Anderson & Susan Abbott (Cholla Needles Press)

Now Voyager is a collaborative project as part of Cholla Needles’ series of books that combine art and poetry and have included poets and artists like Cindy Rinne, Kendall Johnson, and David Chorlton. Anderson’s poetry is illustrated by Abbott’s art and the result is poems that are enhanced by the surreal nature of Abbott’s watercolor paintings and paintings that are given spiritual context by Anderson’s poetry. Anderson, who lives in the deserts of California near Joshua Tree National Park captures the reality of living in this wild and extraordinary place. Her poetry is at once a journey into the mystical as it is an appreciation for the natural world  and her relationship to it.

     Anderson’s poetry is not universally positive; she takes a look at her own carbon footprint and anxiety about living in the desert where too many resources are being consumed by the people who love living outside the boundary of the city. The prose poem “Future Archaeology” imagines a future where anthropologists look over the remains of her community. A narrator describe the destruction of society:

The water was what kept the desert alive. When it ran out, the locals had no choice but to get in their cars and drive away — heading for the coast, where the water wars began. There’s nothing here worth further study, we’ve seen it all before . . . We’ll let the desert bury this town, let the sandstorms do their work.

However, if these passages and others like them present a hopeless vision of the future of humanity, it is hopeful for the future of nature. Here the desert is the most powerful force. It is not, thankfully, the desert that people have destroyed. They have only destroyed themselves, and the desert takes back what should not have been there in the first place. 

     While there are anxieties about her effect on the natural world, the heart of this collection is her joy for the beauty of the natural world. In “Early Earth,” she describes our planet when it was young:

         From deep space

         the view is clear —

         hardly a cloud

         to hide the surface.

         . . . 

         Already life pulls 

         nitrogen from air

         to build the biosphere

There is a love here not just of the earth as an object of beauty but for the science of it that has created our world. She blends mystical and scientific throughout so there seems to be no difference between the two. The chemistry of the earth, the physics that go into it are seen as magical.

     Cholla Needles has created a community of artists and writers to the east of Los Angeles that should be recognized and commended. It is a group of people who are working in collaboration to build something bigger than individual books. They are forming a new vision of the desert and its people.

John Brantingham 25^th June 2021